Taphonomy
Taphonomy
This book offers a comprehensive review of the entire field of taphonomy, the science of fossil preservation. It describes the formation of plant and animal fossils in oceanic, terrestrial and river settings and how this affects deciphering the ecology and extinction of past lifeforms and the environments in which they lived. Coverage emphasizes a process approach to the subject and reviews the taphonomic behavior of all important taxa, both plant and animal. The book will be of main interest to advanced students and professionals working in paleontology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, climate modeling and biogeochemistry. It will also appeal to anyone interested in the preservation of fossils and the formation of fossil assemblages.
- Was the first single-authored comprehensive book to cover the whole field of taphonomy
- Applications of taphonomy to solving academic amd environmental problems included
- Mathematical models developed whenever available
Reviews & endorsements
"Taphonomy: A Process Approach is a good measure of how far taphonomy and paleontology have come in the past decades. From case studies to grand syntheses, from documenting patterns to understanding processes, and from bemoaning the quality of fossil record to putting meaningful confidence limits on fossil data...Taphonomy: A Process Approach is the first review of this discipline that pulls together case studies from marine microfossils, marine invertebrates, vertebrates, plants, and pollen." Science
"An outstanding compendium and organized summary of an inordinate number of references...I strongly recommend this book to all advanced students of paleontology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, and Earth history, in general. It is reasonably priced, rather well illustrated, and summarizes just about all the major ideas of taphonomy...the author and the editors are to be commended on a rather finely crafted text with few errors. This is a first attempt to pull together such a wide array of disparate information, and Ron Martin is to be congratulated on having achieved such a formidable goal in a timely fashion." Journal of Geoscience Education
Product details
October 1999Hardback
9780521591713
524 pages
255 × 180 × 29 mm
1.225kg
94 b/w illus. 33 tables
Temporarily unavailable - available from TBC
Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1. Introduction: the science of taphonomy
- 2. Biostratinomy I: necrolysis, transport and abrasion
- 3. Biostratinomy II: dissolution and diagenesis
- 4. Bioturbation
- 5. Time-averaging of fossil assemblages: taphonomy and temporal resolution
- 6. Exceptional preservation
- 7. Sedimentation and stratigraphy
- 8. Megabiases I: cycles of preservation and biomineralization
- 9. Megabiases II: secular trends in preservation
- 10. Applied taphonomy
- 11. Taphonomy as an historical science
- References.
