This photographically rich volume provides a synthetic overview of a wide sample of Lagerstätten from marine environments reaching back in time to the Precambrian, more than 500 million years ago. These occurrences of exceptional fossil preservation are providing scientists with a new source of evidence to understand how life has evolved in the Earth's oceans.
A comprehensive yet compact guide for laboratory, classroom, and field use, Handbook of Paleozoology covers the morphology, classification, and distribution of ancient animal life throughout the world. This unique, heavily illustrated compendium presents useful information in a ready-reference format for everyone who studies, collects, and works with fossils.
Unlike most general accounts of paleozoology, the Handbook deals with both vertebrates and invertebrates. Physical features and taxonomical classifications are clearly and concisely described, with geographical and temporal ranges that enable the fossils to be located in geological time. More than 170 multipart line drawings appear throughout the book, comparing different groups and offering detailed views of particular species. The book provides a superb introduction for students and an excellent field consultation and review resource for specialists.
Description: Fossil communities, chiefly benthic, from Silurian and Devonian rocks are looked at in detail within this book. Discussion of their environmental and evolutionary significance provides a unique ecological view of this intensively studied part of the stratigraphic column. It is hoped that this case-study will illustrate a new trend for palaeontological research and synthesis that could be applied to other time intervals. Forty contributions from all parts of the world discuss and exemplify the general principles of this massive compilation and provide descriptions of many of the shelly mid-Silurian and early Devonian benthic communities in encyclopaedic form. Biostratigraphers and palaeontologists, as well as evolutionists and ecologists, concerned with fossil communities and their evolution will find this volume of interest. This book forms the final report of IGCP Project 53.
