Outline Of Eastern North Pacific Fossil Cetacean Assemblages

Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) have fascinated and bewildered humans throughout history. Their mammalian affinities have been long recognized, but exactly which group of terrestrial mammals they descend from has, until recently, remained in the dark. Recent decades have produced a flurry of new fossil cetaceans, extending their fossil history to over 50 million years ago. Along with new insights from genetics and developmental studies, these discoveries have helped to clarify the place of cetaceans among mammals, and enriched our understanding of their unique adaptations for feeding, locomotion and sensory systems. Their continuously improving fossil record and successive transformation into highly specialized marine mammals have made cetaceans a textbook case of evolution - as iconic in its own way as the origin of birds from dinosaurs. This book aims to summarize our current understanding of cetacean evolution for the serious student and interested amateur using photographs, drawings, charts and illustrations.

Twenty-three separate papers, each describing a single species.

Aquatic creatures.

The marine Eocene-Oligocene transition of 34 million years ago was a critical turning point in Earth's climatic history, when the warm, high-diversity "greenhouse" world of the early Eocene ceded to the glacial, "icehouse" conditions of the early Oligocene. This book surveys the advances in stratigraphic and paleontological research and isotopic analysis made since 1989 in regard to marine deposits around the world. In particular, it summarizes the high-resolution details of the so-called doubthouse interval (roughly 45 to 34 million years ago), which is critical to testing climatic and evolutionary hypotheses about the Eocene deterioration. The authors' goals are to discuss the latest information concerning climatic and oceanographic change associated with this transition and to examine geographic and taxonomic patterns in biotic turnover that provide clues about where, when, and how fast these environmental changes happened. They address a range of topics, including the tectonic and paleogeographic setting of the Paleogene; specific issues related to the stratigraphy of shelf deposits; advances in recognizing and correlating boundary sections; trends in the expression of climate change; and patterns of faunal and floral turnover. In the process, they produce a valuable synthesis of patterns of change by latitude and environment.

The vertebrate fossil record extends back more than 500 million years, and bonebeds—localized concentrations of the skeletal remains of vertebrate animals—help unlock the secrets of this long history. Often spectacularly preserved, bonebeds—both modern and ancient—can reveal more about life histories, ecological associations, and preservation patterns than any single skeleton or bone. For this reason, bonebeds are frequently studied by paleobiologists, geologists, and archeologists seeking to piece together the vertebrate record. Thirteen respected researchers combine their experiences in Bonebeds, providing readers with workable definitions, theoretical frameworks, and a compendium of modern techniques in bonebed data collection and analysis. By addressing the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of bonebed research, this edited volume—the first of its kind—provides the background and methods that students and professionals need to explore and understand these fantastic records of ancient life and death.