The history of life, reconstructed from an incomplete record.
10 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Pre-Cambrian Animals
Martin F. Glaessner · 1961
Argues the soft-bodied Ediacaran impressions found across several continents are genuine multicellular animals and not inorganic or algal structures,…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Essay on the Theory of the Earth
Georges Cuvier · 1813
Argues from the anatomy of mammoth and mastodon bones that whole species have gone extinct in sudden catastrophic episodes, founding the scientific…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Fossil Plants: A Text-Book for Students of Botany and Geology, Vol. I
A. C. Seward · 1898
Lays out the systematic study of plant fossils as its own discipline, organised by plant group rather than treated as a footnote to zoological…
+7 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Martin F. Glaessner
Argues the soft-bodied Ediacaran impressions found across several continents are genuine multicellular animals and not inorganic or algal structures, establishing them as the oldest known animal fossils.
Georges Cuvier
Argues from the anatomy of mammoth and mastodon bones that whole species have gone extinct in sudden catastrophic episodes, founding the scientific study of extinction against the prevailing belief that no species could be lost.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Raymond A. Dart
Describes the Taung Child skull and argues, against most contemporary opinion, that it represents an early human ancestor from Africa rather than an ape, relocating the search for human origins to that continent.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert T. Bakker
Argues from predator-to-prey ratios and bone structure that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, active animals rather than sluggish reptiles, reopening a debate about dinosaur physiology that is still not fully settled.
Anna K. Behrensmeyer
Defines six sequential stages of bone weathering that let a fossil assemblage's surface condition be read as a measure of how long it sat exposed before burial.
link checked 17 Sept 2026A. C. Seward
Lays out the systematic study of plant fossils as its own discipline, organised by plant group rather than treated as a footnote to zoological palaeontology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026I. A. Efremov
Coins taphonomy as the study of the transition of organic remains from the biosphere into the lithosphere, arguing fossilisation is itself a process worth modelling rather than a gap to see past.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John H. Ostrom
Describes a fast, agile predatory dinosaur whose anatomy reopened the case for a close evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds, launching what became known as the Dinosaur Renaissance.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John H. Ostrom
Makes the detailed anatomical case that birds evolved directly from small theropod dinosaurs, rather than from an earlier and more generalised archosaur ancestor.
David M. Raup & J. John Sepkoski Jr.
Finds a statistically regular 26-million-year cycle in the marine fossil extinction record and argues it points to a periodic external cause rather than purely biological or geological ones.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. William Schopf & Bonnie M. Packer
Reports filamentous microstructures in 3.5-billion-year-old Australian chert as the oldest fossil evidence of life, a claim later re-examined and partly disputed as inorganic mineral artefacts rather than biology.
Douglas H. Erwin & Marc Laflamme
Reconciles molecular clock estimates that push animal origins deep into the Precambrian with the sudden Cambrian fossil record by arguing that ecological triggers, not the mere appearance of new body plans, explain the timing of the radiation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026