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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 14, 2019 17:28:05 GMT 5
I'm sure you've all heard some temporal provincial->, as I like to call them, say something like this, whether directed towards you or just in general, at some point in your lives. www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2223102/How-eat-Triceratops-Researchers-reveal-T-Rex-ripped-victims-heads-juicy-neck-meat.htmlWhich begs the important question: why does paleontology matter? I've been thinking more about this lately to better understand why what I've been so interested in for my entire life matters to us now. And if you're planning on getting into the field of paleontology in the future (or are in it), it's best you know the answer to this question. So I decided to make a thread dedicated to any information or insight that explains why ecosystems and organisms that disappeared thousands, if not millions, or even billions of years ago, still matter to us today. I posted a Tweet-> that posts a pretty straightforward, practical reason explaining the relevance of paleontology. Recently I've also found the epilogue to Scott D. Sampson's Dinosaur Odyssey-> (Google gives you most of it, although one page is missing; can someone find the full book online?); this was the most intriguing I have ever heard, and it makes sense. EDIT: JSTOR provides me with access to each individual chapter of Dinosaur Odyssey. The access is really provided by my college's library. So now I do have full access to it, at least for now. |
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 14, 2019 17:57:20 GMT 5
Thanks a million for making this thread; I've had enough with palaeontology nay-sayers.
Anyhow, why I think it's important is that we can educate ourselves on ancient life, which can help us learn about geology and modern life too.
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Post by theropod on Sept 14, 2019 19:08:56 GMT 5
Some points:
Firstly, studying earth history is important for similar reasons to why studying human history is important. It vastly broadens our experience and ability to learn from past events. If we want to know about the effects of climate change, or a meteorite impact, or sea level rise, we cannot study that in an experimental setting, but we can study the geological and palaeontological record of such events, and specifically their impacts on the biosphere. The study of the causes and effects of past mass extinctions is instrumental in warning us about the current one. The study of evolution in the fossil record adds to our understanding of processes shaping extant organisms, including ones that are of medical or agricultural importance to us.
Secondly, palaeontology is an integral part of science, and without it there is a gap in our understanding of it. Yes, I personally don’t really need to know about Lower Cretaceous titanosaur diversity to study cancer cells, and most people who do probably don’t, but on the grounds that it is the goal of science to improve our understanding of the world, and because one never really knows what field is the next to yield a potentially useful breakthrough. Science can only fulfill its goal entirely if there are scientists studying all aspects of the natural world, according to their own preferences and abilities.
Thirdly, palaeontology does have some extremely practical applications. Micropalaeontology was and is still widely used in resource exploration. Of course drilling for oil is going to be a thing of the past soo. But the same field can also be used to monitor the integrity of marine ecosystems based on the same proxies, such as foraminifers. Palaeopalynology is used for studying recent climate history, which is among the most practically important scientific fields one could possibly imagine.
So if anything, the question should be "Why does vertebrate palaeontology matter?". Well, even discounting all the above, why does art matter, why does music matter, or literature, or film?
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Post by creature386 on Sept 14, 2019 19:43:02 GMT 5
Interestingly, I talked about this twice in a recent English course.
Here's an essay I wrote on the topic (we were supposed to imagine universities tried to cut funding for our favorite discipline and argue against that):I also touched in this on my video on paleoclimatology:
Unfortunately, I had no defense for vertebrate paleontology I felt self-confident enough to present (that, and I was only supposed to talk about things which are part of my major, vertebrate paleontology isn't).
OK, technically, the part with the horse grazing IS a defense of vertebrate paleontology, so, there's that. Although, it's still a bit specific.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 15, 2019 0:35:55 GMT 5
Right, I've been told "Dinosaurs are irrelevant to today", not "Micropaleontology and cause-and-effect relationships from past climate change are irrelevant to today". This is where Scott Sampson's talk of the "Great Story" comes in. And this is my attempt at trying to paraphrase/condense what he said. People have pushed for "ecoliteracy" in education, to promote understanding of ecology and how humans fit into it. And this is important, because we all need to adopt a narrative/worldview that says that all life on Earth is related (something paleontology has been instrumental in uncovering btw) and deserving of respect, fostering the sentiment to reverse the current mass extinction. But this misses the element of transformation, particularly, the transformation of life. If we want to get it through people's skulls that all life on Earth is related (including to us) and deserving of respect, we not only need to fit humans into the larger context of Earth's present-day ecosystems, but also in the context of deep time. The narrative to do that latter part of the job is the "Great Story", the story that spans all the way from the Big Bang to the present day. And included in the Great Story are, surprise surprise, dinosaurs, stem-mammals, fossil mammals, pterosaurs, placoderms, etc., etc., etc. Literally everything we learn from vertebrate paleontology (and all other branches thereof, for that matter), including how big fossil animals were, how they foraged for food or killed their prey, how they mated, fed, regulated their body temperature, etc., etc., etc. is a part of the Great Story. All of that is part of the narrative/story that places us humans in a larger context. Even ignoring this abstract concept of the Great Story, one can still argue that vertebrate paleontology has practical applications to today, particularly with modern vertebrates and ecology. I've read publications where people have compared bodily structures of living animals to those of extinct creatures, whether briefly in some or as the main subject of the paper; e.g. T. rex's skull compared to an orca's, or Spinosaurus' jaws compared to a pike conger eel's. Anything that helps to solidify our understanding of modern animal form and function is important; you'll never know when a certain aspect of an animal's anatomy, and therefore its function; behavior; and ecology, could become an important subject of its future survival in the midst of anthropogenic extinction. See this example with Tasmanian devil bite force (and how it may help against invasive foxes)-> as a potential example. Alternatively, some aspects of the modern world may only be explained by answers from vertebrae paleontology; how long would it have taken for us to postulate that maybe the reason why Joshua trees are suffering today is because there are no Shasta ground sloths alive today to disperse their seeds with their dung? Of course, that's not to say you can't know this by just studying living animal behavior, anatomy, and ecology directly, but studying extinct vertebrates can provide a more nuanced view thereof. |
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Post by theropod on Sept 15, 2019 1:42:56 GMT 5
Because vertebrate palaeontologists have studied extensively how osteology changed over time and compare between different animals, the result is often an especially fundamental, detailed understanding of skeletal structures and function. Vertebrate palaeontologists end up teaching human anatomy comparatively often for that reason, even if it’s not our original subject of study.
Some aspects of vertebrate palaeontology can have direct bearing on neontological ecology. For example, to what degree humans contributed to the late Pleistocene megafauna extinction is still being studied and debated, but it might have major implications for our understanding of extant ones. It has been proposed that the extinction of mammoths in siberia was the major factor in transformation of steppe into birch forests, whose lower albedo caused regional warming of up to 1°C (we know why regional warming in certain northerly latitudes might be catastrophic on a global scale–the permafrost soils–so it might make sense to be especially vigorous in conservation efforts of large herbivores still existing in such environments).
If humans were responsible for this, this is a precedent to how human activity can destabilize and transform entire ecosystems…even at a time when the atlatl was the most advanced weapon we had access to.
In extant ecology, we know the extinction of apex predators causes major problems for the entire ecosystem, such as unchecked explosion of herbivore populations. Such apex predators also went extinct in the Pleistocene, possibly due to humans. Many extant ecosystems might still be lacking animals to fill the niches of ones that went extinct in relatively recent times, such as lions in Europe and North America, or Sabre-toothed cats. I’m not saying we should start re-introducing such animals now, but we need to know they existed and what consequences their extinction had to know the consequences or reasons for the extinction and reintroduction of predators that are still extant. Understanding such ecological cascade reactions is an important part of palaeontology.
In the "great story" department, the importance of organismic palaeontology is simply to demonstrate that extant biodiversity is merely a small part of the entire tree of life, and observations based on extant animals alone can be misleading. For example the traditional view characterizing "reptiles" as ectothermic is wrong, upon closer look even when looking at extant ones, but this becomes blatantly obvious when looking at the fossil record, which reveals massive radiations of endothermic reptiles that existed for hundreds of millions of years, and those reptiles still existing today are a mere remnant of what they once were.
There’s really no way to predict if and when that kind of knowledge ends up having "practical" applications outside of science, but it is undoubtedly fundamental to our understanding of biodiversity. An important conclusion we can already reach, and need to reinforce in people’s minds, is that huge groups of organisms (such as various endothermic reptiles, or going further back, stem-synapsids) can simply vanish without leaving any descendant. Without knowing earth’s history, such a proposal would be entirely hypothetical. In the face of the conservation crisis we face, the importance of direct, hard evidence of what can happen cannot be understated.
That is what creationists often criticise about evolution, after all, supposed lack of direct observations (conveniently ignoring all those direct observations of evolution that can actually be made, including the fossil record). No doubt similar arguments are being advanced by anti-environmentalists, the sort who think it’s "arrogant" that humans could have such an impact on our climate system and biosphere.
In short, there are very good scientific and practical reasons for studying palaeontology. There are also other sciences well worth studying. People should pursue the one they are interested in, the one which fulfills them, because they are likely to make the best contributions there, and those can be valuable in any discipline (except maybe military engineering, which, while fascinating, hasn’t really contributed positively to the world).
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 15, 2019 1:45:55 GMT 5
Oh yes, this is all quite true!
If I had a dollar for every time someone said extinct animals were irrelevant, the world would go broke
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Post by creature386 on Sept 15, 2019 3:04:15 GMT 5
It's worth noting is that scientific discoveries have a history of indirectly and unexpectedly turning out to be very useful. Who would have thought that something as abstract and seemingly useless-to-know like the fact that time passes differently depending on the gravity field (i.e. general relativity) could one day help us to create GPS?
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Post by theropod on Sept 15, 2019 3:15:36 GMT 5
Relativity? Isn’t that some sort of hoax made up by liberals/leftists?
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Post by creature386 on Sept 15, 2019 13:17:43 GMT 5
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Post by dinosauria101 on Sept 15, 2019 17:14:29 GMT 5
It's worth noting is that scientific discoveries have a history of indirectly and unexpectedly turning out to be very useful. Who would have thought that something as abstract and seemingly useless-to-know like the fact that time passes differently depending on the gravity field (i.e. general relativity) could one day help us to create GPS? I've got another example for that! Skorpiovenator, seemingly a minor discovery relative to its big contemporaries, is actually quite a big help in regards to the owners of carnosaur-like teeth from Late Cretaceous Brazil; they could be abelisaurid teeth Last paragraph: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-new-discovery-skorpiovenator-the-scorpion-hunter-35510797/ |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Sept 15, 2019 18:23:31 GMT 5
It's worth noting is that scientific discoveries have a history of indirectly and unexpectedly turning out to be very useful. Who would have thought that something as abstract and seemingly useless-to-know like the fact that time passes differently depending on the gravity field (i.e. general relativity) could one day help us to create GPS? I've got another example for that! Skorpiovenator, seemingly a minor discovery relative to its big contemporaries, is actually quite a big help in regards to the owners of carnosaur-like teeth from Late Cretaceous Brazil; they could be abelisaurid teeth Last paragraph: www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-new-discovery-skorpiovenator-the-scorpion-hunter-35510797/We're talking about uses outside of paleontology itself. Although, here's yet another example of just that. www.vice.com/en_us/article/78xadb/why-triceratops-teeth-are-cooler-than-their-hornsTriceratops teeth were so complex that some engineers had to develop a new computational algorithm for three-dimensional wear modeling. |
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jun 17, 2020 8:25:51 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 7, 2023 10:49:00 GMT 5
I wanted to take another stab at this, with a clearer idea of what I'm talking about. So here goes.
Paleontology is basically like studying history, except instead of focusing on recorded human history, you are studying the history of all life on Earth. Everything from the bacteria living in your gut to you yourself. You know what they say about history: "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it", or "...if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree." But instead of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, we have the Permian-Triassic extinction event. Instead of the Black Death, we have the the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Instead of monarchs, politicians, inventors, philosophers, and activists/revolutionaries, we have species that played key roles in past ecosystems.
It's true that, similar to history, not everything studied and learned in paleontology is immediately relevant in tackling current world problems affecting all life on Earth. Whether or not an English longbow could pierce through a knight's plate armor isn't useful information for any of the UK's current issues. Knowing how hard a T. rex could bite isn't useful information for solving climate change. And it's probably true that some time periods and places are more immediately relevant to our modern world than others, even though all of them are ultimately connected to the present day one way or another. The world during the 1960s has more direct connections to us today than the world during the Roman Empire does. The world during the Late Pleistocene is more directly connected to the global biosphere today than the world during the end of the Mesozoic or Paleozoic do.
But wait a minute, shouldn't we know more than just the general gist of important facts and events throughout history, both of all Earth life and humanity? Of course. How can you tell me "The ancient Egyptians were a thing" and yet also tell me "We don't need to know what the ancient Egyptians were like"?
Similarly, how can you tell me "The dinosaurs were a thing" and yet also tell me "We don't need to know how they ate each other, how they mated with each other, or whether they shopped at K-Mart?"? If we don't bother learning more about what dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, stem-mammals, etc., etc. were like, then they're not anything to us. They're just shapeless, colorless blobs without any characteristics whatsoever that just...existed(?) and did...something(?), instead of the actual, living, breathing former inhabitants of our own world that they were. Why is that a problem? Because if we don't ask ourselves "What was the Earth like?", "What were these ancient animals like?", or anything of the sort, our world's history just becomes a nebulous concept that you might as well just forget and know nothing about. Except...it isn't something we can afford to know nothing about, because it's the history of all life on our planet for God's sake!
And what if our assumptions were actually wrong? Then our understanding of our own history is wrong. How can you say that dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 135 million years and forced our own ancestors into being shrew-sized insect-eaters, if you can't – and won't bother to learn – what the dinosaurs (and their mammalian contemporaries) even looked like, how big they were, what they ate, how they ate, etc., etc., etc.? For all I know, maybe most dinosaurs were actually small, and the majority of large-bodied animals at the time were actually giant mammals that we were too lazy to dig up. By actually studying the matter and continuing to do so we can confirm that, yes, dinosaurs were indeed occupying many of Earth's large-bodied terrestrial niches during the Jurassic and Cretaceous (and with their fellow archosaurs flat-out monopolized all large-bodied terrestrial niches). We can confirm that, yes, no mammal during the Mesozoic could properly be considered megafauna. But we can also tell you that they weren't all just tiny insectivores, but were instead living many different lifestyles and occupying different niches with all the constraints the dinosaurs put on them. If this is sounding a lot like the exact purpose of science to you, you're getting the point.
Keep in mind too that this "philosophy" (for lack of a better word) extends all the way down to the finer details. How can you tell me a T. rex was a big carnivore or a dangerous predator if you can't be bothered to learn how big it was or how it ate based on the shape of its teeth, muscle attachments, etc.? Get out there and test it!
And of course, just as with human history, there are points in prehistory more intimately and directly connected to our world today. Our modern day Holocene/Anthropocene world is one directly inherited from that of the Pleistocene. Where once the average global temperature fluctuated so often, for the past 11,700 years it never varied by more than 1oC, and humanity coincidentally was able to start farming and building its great civilizations starting around the same time. Except now we broke the climate and will break it further if we don't stop ourselves in time. What will happen if we go back to Pleistocene levels of climate fluctuation? Last time our world was like that, humanity was nothing more than a bunch of hunter-gatherers spreading and scattered around the globe. Many species during that epoch came and went, most infamously at the end of the Pleistocene. What if this was because of all the climate changes that were happening back then? Or was it because we were such prolific, ruthless hunters of game that we literally ate them into extinction? Why not try and find out (which luckily we do)?
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