Fossils - A Very Short Introduction.pdf

As an evolutionary biologist with interests in development and
physiology, the attraction of fossils for me has been twofold: to discover
how they illuminate our ideas about evolution, and to find ways of using
our knowledge of living organisms to make fossils come ‘alive’. Although
I have spent more time than I care to remember on working with fossils,
I did not set out to be a palaeontologist. I am particularly grateful,
therefore, to my colleagues on both sides of the scholarly neontological/
palaeontological coin for tolerating my invasions, over the years, into
their territories and even assisting me in the process. I have always
worked with vertebrate fossils, rather than invertebrates, plants, or
fungi, and that bias shows in the examples I use; the principles,
however, are common to all fossils.