10 - Applied taphonomy

Summary

History is more or less bunk … We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Henry Ford

The greatest objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold; and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions: We do naturally upon such occasions think of God, and his greatness, and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of INFINITE, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and over-bear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.

Thomas Burnet, The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684, first English edition)

Introduction

Would we really understand the Earth and its Life if we only understood the present? And if not, why not?

The fossil record is a very important – but so far highly underutilized – window that allows us to assess the impact of biological and beogeochemical processes over periods of time much longer than those normally considered by an ecologist.