{"id":8675,"date":"2019-05-22T16:10:18","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/palaeontology\/"},"modified":"2019-05-22T16:10:18","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:10:18","slug":"palaeontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/palaeontology\/","title":{"rendered":"Palaeontology"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A branch of evolutionary biology that draws upon geology to study fossil fauna and flora and their ecologies in order to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships. &nbsp;Crucial to this enterprise are techniques for dating rock formations containing the fossils. &nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.blumenbach.info\/_\/Introduction.html\" class=\"cc-route-enabled\" target=\"_self\" data-editable-link=\"http:\/\/www.blumenbach.info\/_\/Introduction.html&amp;target=_self\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Johann Friedrich Blumenbach<\/a> (1752-1830) was the first to suggest the use of fossils to trace the age of rocks. &nbsp;Palaeontology not only incorporates knowledge from geology, but also anthropology, archaeology, biology, botany, ecology and zoology, and now consists of a number of sub-fields, such as paleoanthropology (the reconstruction of human evolution), palaeoecology (the study of ecology and climate in the past), and ichnology (the study of fossils tracks and footprints).&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"anthropology\">Anthropology<\/a>, <a href=\"biology\">Biology<\/a>, <a href=\"cladistics\">Cladistics<\/a>, <a href=\"ecology\">Ecology<\/a>, <a href=\"evolutionary_biology\">Evolutionary biology<\/a>, <a href=\"general_theory_of_biological_classification\">General theory of biological classification<\/a>, <a href=\"geology\">Geology<\/a>, Phyletic gradualism and punctuated gradualism<\/p>\n<p><\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A branch of evolutionary biology that draws upon geology to study fossil fauna and flora and their ecologies in order to reconstruct phylogenetic relationships. &nbsp;Crucial to this enterprise are techniques for dating rock formations containing the fossils. &nbsp;Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1830) was the first to suggest the use of fossils to trace the age of &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/palaeontology\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Palaeontology&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-8675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-glossary","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}