Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Biogeohistory and the development of classical biostratigraphy
- 2 The biostratigraphy of fossil microplankton
- 3 Biostratigraphy: its integration into modern geochronology
- 4 Biostratigraphy and biohistorical theory I: evolution and correlation
- 5 Systemic stratigraphy: beyond classical biostratigraphy
- 6 Biostratigraphy and biohistorical theory II: carving Nature at the joints
- 7 Biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphic classification
- 8 On biostratigraphy and biogeohistory
- References
- Index
8 - On biostratigraphy and biogeohistory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Biogeohistory and the development of classical biostratigraphy
- 2 The biostratigraphy of fossil microplankton
- 3 Biostratigraphy: its integration into modern geochronology
- 4 Biostratigraphy and biohistorical theory I: evolution and correlation
- 5 Systemic stratigraphy: beyond classical biostratigraphy
- 6 Biostratigraphy and biohistorical theory II: carving Nature at the joints
- 7 Biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphic classification
- 8 On biostratigraphy and biogeohistory
- References
- Index
Summary
Summary
Biostratigraphy is a thoroughly historical science subject to several of the ongoing arguments – the power of consilience, the nature of the biospecies, and the shift away from Lyellian gradualism and easy diachrony. The answer to ‘palaeontologist – biologist or geologist?’ is, both, in biostratigraphy as much as in any of its sister disciplines. Biostratigraphy has three strands in the immediate future. One is to increase the density and rigour of ordination of datums among the major planktonic taxa. A second is the sequence strategy of reconciling bioevents with biofacies and networking mainstream biostratigraphy into facies lacking the index species. The third is to bridge more comprehensively the gap between ‘applied’ or geological biostratigraphy and palaeobiology.
The idea of earth history
This account began with the systematic use of fossils in mapping and correlating strata. Historical geology and historical biology, geohistory and biohistory – they go together in so many contexts that I lump them together as biogeohistory – are remarkably young historical-scientific disciplines. Hancock (1977) briskly dismissed Smith's forerunners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as of little account in stimulating any sustained research programmes in systematic stratigraphy and mapping (with all respects due to the place of the neptunians in Earth history). Even so, there had to be some preparation of the ground, some intellectual developments that stimulated the historical disciplines early in the nineteenth century. What were they?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- BiostratigraphyMicrofossils and Geological Time, pp. 346 - 396Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005