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The simplest definition of "paleontology" is "the study of ancient life". [5] The field seeks information about several aspects of past organisms: "their identity and origin, their environment and evolution, and what they can tell us about the Earth's organic and inorganic past".
The history of paleontology traces the history of the effort to understand the history of life on Earth by studying the fossil record left behind by living organisms. Since it is concerned with understanding living organisms of the past, paleontology can be considered to be a field of biology, but its historical development has been closely tied to geology and the effort to understand the ...
Historical geology or palaeogeology is a discipline that uses the principles and methods of geology to reconstruct the geological history of Earth. [1] Historical geology examines the vastness of geologic time, measured in billions of years, and investigates changes in the Earth , gradual and sudden, over this deep time .
This questioning represented a turning point in the study of the Earth. It was now possible to study the history of the Earth from a scientific perspective without religious preconceptions. With the application of scientific methods to the investigation of the Earth's history, the study of geology could become a distinct field of science.
Resource geology studies how energy resources can be obtained from minerals. Environmental geology studies how pollution and contaminants affect soil and rock. [2] Mineralogy is the study of minerals and includes the study of mineral formation, crystal structure, hazards associated with minerals, and the physical and chemical properties of ...
A derived, reworked or remanié fossil is a fossil found in rock that accumulated significantly later than when the fossilized animal or plant died. [100] Reworked fossils are created by erosion exhuming (freeing) fossils from the rock formation in which they were originally deposited and their redeposition in a younger sedimentary deposit.
Researchers from a trio of universities in Turkey and the United States have spent roughly a year analyzing the rock and soil in the famous Durupinar formation on Mount Ararat, the highest ...
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence (such as petrified skeletal remains, bone fragments, footprints) and cultural ...