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Paleontology has long had a troubled relationship with evolutionary biology. Suffering from a reputation as a second-tier science and conjuring images of fossil collectors and amateurs who dig up bones, it was marginalized even by Darwin himself, who worried that incompleteness in the fossil record would be used against his theory of evolution. But with the establishment of the modern synthesis in the 1940s and the pioneering work of George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, and Theodosius Dobzhansky, as well as the subsequent efforts of Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and James Valentine, paleontology became embedded in biology and emerged as paleobiology, a first-rate discipline central to evolutionary studies. This incredible ascendance of this once-maligned science to the vanguard of a field is chronicled in this book. Chapters here aim to capture the excitement of the seismic changes in the discipline.

Although fossils have provided some of the most important evidence for evolution, the discipline of paleontology has not always had a central place in evolutionary biology. Beginning in Darwin's day, and for much of the twentieth century, paleontologists were often regarded as mere fossil collectors by many evolutionary biologists, their attempts to contribute to evolutionary theory ignored or regarded with scorn. In the 1950s, however, paleontologists began mounting a counter-movement that insisted on the valid, important, and original contribution of paleontology to evolutionary theory. This movement, called “paleobiology” by its proponents, advocated for an approach to the fossil record that was theoretical, quantitative, and oriented towards explaining the broad patterns of evolution and extinction in the history of life. This book provides, as never before, a historical account of the origin, rise, and importance of paleobiology, from the mid-nineteenth century to the late 1980s. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, this book shows how the movement was conceived and promoted by a small but influential group of paleontologists—including Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, among others—and examines the intellectual, disciplinary, and political dynamics involved in the ascendency of paleobiology. By emphasizing the close relationship between paleobiology and other evolutionary disciplines, this book aims to write a new chapter in the history of evolutionary biology, while also offering insights into the dynamics of disciplinary change in modern science.

The nature and concept of "species" are central to paleontology, yet the resurgence of interest in species in evolutionary biology over the past few decades has had surprisingly little impact on how paleontologists think about species. Indeed, paleontological thinking about "species" is distractingly diverse. Are species real or not? Recognizable or not? How, if at all, are species based on fossils comparable to species based on modern organisms? The answers to all of these questions are diverse. Both questions and answers are especially important, however, given the theoretical role of species in modern paleobiology and macroevolution. This book aims to both summarize current paleontological thinking about species, and encourage additional explicit consideration about them.

This book focuses on the interpretation of the fossil record that has been exemplified by the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) controversy, and it has been repeated countless times across a wide array of paleontological studies on macroevolutionary patterns, morphological evolution, community ecology, and biostratigraphy. Stratigraphic paleobiology holds that any interpretation of the fossil record must be based on a modern understanding of the principles of sediment accumulation. It is defined as the intersection of sequence and event stratigraphy with paleobiology. This book addresses the nature and architecture of the stratigraphic record and how environmental gradients determine the distribution of species. A numerical model is developed that predicts many features of the fossil record arising as a result of stratigraphic architecture. Bases for understanding how the ecology and morphology of individual taxa change through time in a stratigraphic context are also provided in this book. The topics covered in this book apply for both marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and across invertebrates, vertebrates, and plants.