Palaeobiology has contributed to the understanding of current global change by analyzing geological records of past environmental change. This session includes topics pertaining to conservation palaeobiology and taphonomy, stratigraphic palaeobiology as well as macroevolution and palaeobiogeography.
Conservation Palaeobiology has demonstrated the potential for analyzing historical environmental changes by using approaches and techniques gleaned from diverse fields of earth sciences. A key factor in translating data from the fossil record lies in understanding how taphonomic processes and filters affect our knowledge of past environmental and diversity change.
Sea level and climate changes exert a major influence on the composition of fossil assemblages and are, at the same time, main driving forces of ecological and evolutionary trends. Reading the fossil record against its sequence stratigraphic background can help separating the effects of these two suites of processes to better reconstruct tempo and mode of ecosystems change through time.
With increasingly better constrained palaeoenvironmental and palaeogeographic data, secular changes in global-scale and regional-scale spatial patterning of extinction, origination and migration and the location of diversity hotspots and sinks can be more rigorously evaluated with spatially-explicit and phylogenetic approaches. Such approaches allow better understanding of processes that generate and maintain the large-scale and persistent biogeographic patterns, such as latitudinal and onshore-offshore gradients in diversity and in evolutionary turnover.