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 …

Fossil corals provide valuable data for reconstructing past sea levels, as they are often well
preserved in the fossil record and can be dated with U-series methods. Here we present a …

Taphonomy plays diverse roles in paleobiology. These include assessing sample quality
relevant to ecologic, biogeographic, and evolutionary questions, diagnosing the roles of …

Stone tool assemblage variability is considered a reliable proxy measure of adaptive
variability. Raw material richness, transport distances, and the character of transported …

This study quantifies the fine structure of time-averaging by using large samples of dated
shells collected from within individual strata. Time-averaging results in both good and bad …

Modern human dispersal into Europe is thought to have occurred with the start of the Upper
Paleolithic around 50,000–40,000 y ago. The Levantine corridor hypothesis suggests that …

One of the major obstacles in dealing with any form of data derived from fossils is the effects
of time-averaging, which are the result of mixing the remains of organisms that did not live …

Biogenic reefs have been hotspots of biodiversity and evolutionary novelty throughout the
Phanerozoic. The largest reef systems in Earth's history occurred in the Devonian period, but …

Species distribution modeling (SDM) is a methodology that has been widely used in the past
two decades for develo** quantitative, empirical, predictive models of species …

Use of models derived from foraging theory to explain variation in prey-abundance indices
over time and space, evidenced in the zooarchaeological record, is common in western …