Fossils are cool. Fossils are amazing. This book is about the incredible stories fossils tell us, and the staggering insights they give us into the history of the earth and the evolution of life. I hope you find this quick tour through the world of fossils both informative and enjoyable.

Ammonites are an extinct and charismatic lineage that persisted for over 300 million years. They were used, with other fossils, to corroborate the principle of faunal succession and launch the field of biostratigraphy. Despite intense research, many important questions remain unanswered. Furthermore, outdated hypotheses persist. Many new findings include a better understanding of their appearance in life, their locomotion, and their

role in long-gone ecosystems. Of course, there are still controversies, e.g., why did shell complexity increase during evolutionary history. This richly illustrated book describes the full range of ammonoids and their fascinating evolutionary history.

I’ve already written several books about fossils and paleontology, including a college textbook in paleontology for upper-level undergraduates (Bringing Fossils to Life, 2nd ed., 2013, Columbia University Press) and a popular book about fossil collecting (Fantastic Fossils, 2020, Columbia University Press), but I’ve never found a book that gives a good general introduction to vertebrate history for the general reader and fossil enthusiast with high-quality color illustrations, so this book is intended to fll that need.

Since the publication of my book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (Columbia University Press, 2007; second edition, 2017), the fields of evolutionary biology and paleontology have made many new discoveries. Meanwhile, the evidence for evolution has been piling up and accumulating since publication in 1859 of the revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. Some of that evidence is discussed in my first evolution book, but much of it is new, or mentioned only briefly in that book. <...>

The earth is a dynamic planet, always changing and evolving. Its oceans and atmospheres have transformed radically since the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago. Its crust is in constant motion, pulling continents apart and slamming them together to produce the great earthquakes and volcanoes. The core and mantle beneath are also flowing and moving, causing the changes in the crust above and in the magnetic field that shields us all from cosmic radiation.

Thomas Henry Huxley proclaimed the Origin of Species to be “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s Principia.” Ernst Mayr, arguably the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin, asserted that the Origin of Species triggered the greatest paradigm shift in the history of science. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who inherited Huxley’s mantle as public intellectual, called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. The philosopher of science Daniel Dennett called evolution the most dangerous idea in the history of science.<...>

For centuries, people had picked up huge bones in the ground and puzzled over their origins. In some parts of the world, they were thought to be the remains of legendary dragons, sea monsters, or Cyclopes. On the Greek island of Samos, the numerous large bones were thought to be the remains of Amazon warrior women who had died in battle. (We now know they are the remains of elephants, giraffes, antelopes, cattle, hyenas, and other mammals that were abundantly fossilized there.)

The Lost World was a work of fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but it was based on the newly made discovery of actual isolated plateaus in the  Amazonian jungles of South America inhabited by unique creatures unknown to science. Not even Doyle could have imagined the extinct gigantic creatures that really did exist in the prehistoric past of South America. <...>

Fossil hunting is by far the most fascinating of all sports. It has some danger, enough to give it zest and probably about as much as in the average modern engineered big-game hunt, and the danger is wholly to the hunter. It has uncertainty and excitement and all the thrills of gambling with none of its vicious features. The hunter never knows what his bag may be, perhaps nothing, perhaps a creature never before seen by human eyes. It requires knowledge, skill, and some degree of hardihood. And its results are so much more important, more worthwhile, and more enduring that those of any other sport! The fossil hunter does not kill, he resurrects. And the result of this sport is to add to the sum of human pleasure and to the treasure of human knowledge.

We substantially revised the first and second editions of this book while retaining our original objectives: to help you better understand (1) the processes that erode, transport, and deposit sediments (sedimentology); (2) the characteristics and origins of sedimentary rocks (sedimentary petrology); and (3) the complex distribution of the sedimentary rock record in space and time (stratigraphy). The first two areas are the subjects of Chapters 1 through 14. The field of stratigraphy is covered in Chapters 15 through 19.