History of invertebrate paleozoology

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The history of invertebrate paleozoology (also spelled palaeozoology) differs from the

extinct marine invertebrates, while the latter typically emphasizes the earth sciences and the sedimentary rock remains of terrestrial vertebrates
.

The

simpler sea-dwelling organisms
.

By far, invertebrate paleozoology is the easiest type of

fossilized
.

Origins of invertebrate paleozoology

Fossilized echinoderms have been found in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, central England, decorating a long-buried human skeleton; the prehistoric gravesite was Neolithic
.

In widely separated,

prehistoric animals
.

Scholars in

Akragas
hypothesized that natural selection was occurring over vast, incomprehensible expanses of time.

By the middle of the 4th century BCE, Aristotle was composing On the Origins of Animals. Both he and his follower/successor Theophrastus speculated that plastic forces within the earth had turned animals into fossils of stone.

In the

naturalists by the 16th century.[1]

Paleozoology was an area of interest in the

mineralology - discussed and illustrated invertebrate fossils in his De Natura Fossilium
(1546 / 1558).

Although remembered mostly for his development of

the Americas and Australasia
.

period – the Jurassic
– was named.

19th-century developments

A plate from William Smith's 1815 work Strata by Organized Fossils

Soon thereafter, Buffon's colleague

the more adaptable prehistoric invertebrates were the animals that survived environmental change – a prelude to the concept of survival of the fittest
.

Next,

index fossils to map British outcrops in his Geological Map of England and Wales with Part of Scotland (1815), and in his book the very next year, Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (1816).[2]

Trilobite fossil

era be named the Paleozoic
.

Meanwhile, yet another

eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages
.

Crinoid fossil

The provocative

Pre-Cambrian creatures prior to the Cambrian explosion of the invertebrates, since many critics saw this absence as proof of creationism
.

Around the same time,

echinoids
, mollusks and other ancient marine invertebrates.

Inspired by Darwin's

genealogical trees of the Animal Kingdom in his General Morphology of Organisms
(1866).

A half-century later, the

theory of evolution.[3]

20th-century developments

Around the same time,

fossiliferous site.[4]

Meanwhile, in The Origin of Continents and Oceans (1915 / 1929), Alfred Wegener outlined his heretical theory of continental drift. Although he cited invertebrate fossils and continental geography in support of his idea, another half-century would pass before Wegener's theory would be vindicated by findings in geophysics and plate tectonics.

By that time, 20th-century sciences – such as

Sinkiang, the Mongolian Plateau, and Antarctica
.

In 1947,

Pre-Cambrian
fossils was now put at rest.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ISBN 0-226-73103-0
  2. ^ For Smith's founding of English geology, read Simon Winchester (2001), The Map that Changed the World (London, England: HarperCollins and the Geological Society of London).
  3. ISBN 0-231-05475-0
    .
  4. W. W. Norton
    ).
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