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Summary

Biostratigraphy deals with the documentation, analysis and interpretation of the ordered succession of fossils, their relationships to evolving earth and life history, and their application to the elucidation thereof (Emery and Myers, 1996; Jones, 1996; Doyle and Bennett, 1998; Backman, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Bowring and Martin, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Marshall, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Rawson, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Coe, 2003; Harries, 2003; Gradstein et al., in Gradstein et al., 2005; McGowran, in press). Together with sequence stratigraphy, it is one of the principal bases for chronostratigraphic subdivision and correlation of lithological units, thus providing a spatiotemporal context for their interpretation, and is a fundamental building-block of earth science. This chapter deals with applications of biostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy in the interpretation of earth – and life – history.

Biostratigraphy

The stratigraphic distributions of the principal fossil groups discussed in Chapter 3 are summarised in Fig. 6.1. The ranges over which they are stratigraphically useful are shown by broad bands. It is evident that most are only useful over certain time intervals, and then only in the appropriate facies. Note also that the potential biostratigraphic usefulness of fossils can be impaired by natural factors, such as post-mortem transportation and diagenetic effects (see Section 2.2), and reworking. The biostratigraphic usefulness of fossils can also be impaired by artificial factors, such as sample acquisition and processing, and subjectivity in specific identification.

Some of the more stratigraphically useful fossil groups are the dinoflagellates, diatoms, calcareous nannoplankton, acritarchs, Bolboforma, foraminiferans, radiolarians, calpionellids, plants, archaeocyathans, ammonoids, belemnites, tentaculitids, trilobites, graptolites, chitinozoans, conodonts and mammals (see appropriate sections in Chapter 3; see also Sub-section 6.1.1). Other groups are only locally important.

Significantly, the more stratigraphically useful fossil groups share two common characteristics: firstly, relatively rapid rates of evolutionary turnover, and hence restricted stratigraphic distributions, and/or essentially isochronous first and last appearances; and secondly, essentially unrestricted ecological distributions (for example, throughout the marine realm, and across a range of biogeographic provinces, in the case of many planktonic or nektonic forms). The most useful groups for practical purposes are also, typically, abundant, well preserved, and easy to identify. These are referred to as ‘marker fossils’ or ‘index fossils’. Conversely, the less stratigraphically useful groups characteristically exhibit relatively slow rates of evolutionary turnover, and/or diachronous or time-transgressive first and last appearances.

Summary

By the closing decades of the Quattrocento (the fifteenth century), humanism dominated the culture of the ruling groups in all important Italian cities, from Rome north to the Alps. Although Florence deservedly has received the most attention and provides the best evidence of a link between the new culture and an ethic of political action and public service, humanism fitted almost as neatly into the need of the many princely courts for a distinctive lay culture and for a cadre of classically educated administrators and advisers to the ruler. Even the papal curia at Rome found the linguistic and scholarly skills of humanists useful in the chancery, the department that drafted papal letters and many other official documents. Although the sympathy of Pope Nicholas V for humanism, expressed in his library and his programme of sponsoring translations from the Greek, quickened this process, humanists played an important role in curial administration even under Paul II (1471–84), who began his pontificate by dismissing many curial humanists and even arrested several of them in 1468 on trumped-up charges of impiety that probably masked his fear of political conspiracies. By 1500, Rome was on its way to outstripping Florence as the most brilliant centre of humanistic culture, just as it was also taking leadership in the patronage of art.

Printing and the new culture

The rise of curial and courtly humanism and the growing dominance of humanist schoolmasters in the Latin grammar schools of the peninsula did much to establish humanism as the major force in Italian culture. Another source of humanism's growing dominance was the new art of printing.

Summary

This chapter deals with the generalities and specifics of the evolutionary and extinction events and trends that have controlled past and present, and will control future, biodiversity on Earth.

Readers interested in further details of a general nature are referred to Nisbet (1991), van Andel (1994), Moore et al. (1996), Smith and Szathmary (1999), Stanley (1999), Wicander and Monroe (2000), Groombridge and Jenkins (2002), Conway Morris (2003), Southwood (2003), Dawkins (2004), Erwin, in Moya and Font (2004), Prothero and Dott (2004) and Cowen (in press).

Evolution and extinction

The history of life on Earth, insofar as it can be captured in words, can be said to have been one of general evolutionary diversification intermittently interrupted by mass extinction and recovery (Benton, 1995; Rosenzweig, 1995; Foote, in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Miller, in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Benton, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Groombridge and Jenkins, 2002). Certain of the difficulties in description arise from difficulties in quantifying diversity, in part in turn arising from uncertainties as to the representativeness of the fossil record, and from biases and inconsistencies in sampling and interpreting same (see Box 5.1). There are particular problems associated with taxonomic bias and inconsistency, that is, the definition of taxa across different fossil groups. The two main models that have been proposed to date for the evolution of diversity are the equilibrium model, which assumes – logistic – diversification only up to and not beyond a critical point, and the expansion model, which assumes continuous – either additive or exponential – diversification (Benton, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001).

Evolution

This is not the appropriate forum for a detailed discussion of the complex and contentious subject of evolution, that is, the process whereby species and higher-level taxa evolve – or are transformed – into and replaced by others. Suffice it to say here that empirical observations of the fossil record should leave little doubt, even in the mind of the most ardent creationist, that evolution has manifestly evidently been taking place throughout geological time. The difficulties that sceptics have in understanding and accepting evolution perhaps arise in part from the fact that the process cannot actually be observed, other than under artificial laboratory conditions, as it occurs over generations (Lazarus, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001).

Summary

The bright hopes of a dawning golden age of peace, social justice, and religious renewal that Erasmus expressed in his famous letter of 1517 to the young humanist Capito (Ep. 541, in Collected Works of Erasmus 4: 261–68) evaporated in the fires of religious controversy. For Erasmus personally, the bitter divisions that separated Protestant from Catholic were both a social disaster and a personal tragedy, causing sharp alienation between him and many of his younger disciples. Christian humanism, Erasmian humanism, as a coherent programme of religious and cultural renewal ceased to be a unified movement. Some historians would therefore end the history of Renaissance humanism with the outbreak and rapid spread of the Reformation, taking the open break between Erasmus and Luther in 1524 as the symbolic final act. Though such a conclusion reflects the bleak despair with which Erasmus and his friends viewed the religious schism, it overlooks some deeper and more lasting consequences of the spread of humanistic learning. Despite the uncertainties and violence of the Reformation era, humanism was alive. Although divided by confessional hostilities, humanism remained a major force in religion, both Protestant and Catholic. Its penetration of schools and universities continued almost everywhere, so that even the most self-consciously conservative educational systems produced graduates equipped with humanistic knowledge and skills. The humanist penetration of the schools inevitably led also to a more shallow but unmistakable diffusion of the new Latin culture into the vernacular world, through popular and courtly literature, translations, imitations, and the fine arts.

Summary

The last thing readers want from the authors of history books is arcane historiographical debates among contending schools of interpretation. Yet in the case of Renaissance humanism, any serious reader needs some knowledge of where we have been since 1860, when the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt put forward what long remained the dominant concepts of the key terms, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘humanism’, in his masterpiece of cultural history, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Although few specialists today would give unqualified endorsement to his description of the age, it was profoundly appealing to his contemporaries, and it still has much to offer.

Burckhardt's book quickly captured the imagination of educated readers because it was a subtle and learned synthesis of opinions about the Renaissance that had been accumulating for centuries and had grown powerful during the Age of the Enlightenment (Ferguson 1948). Burckhardt seemed to confirm a story that had already become prevalent but had never before been given such a powerful and coherent presentation. This story, or historical myth, was the product of the secular intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were searching for the origins of their own beliefs and values. According to this story, after the collapse of ancient civilization in the fifth century AD, a thousand years of darkness and barbarism ensued, with the Christian church acting simultaneously to preserve some few shreds of ancient civilization and to suppress any intellectual or religious revivals that might weaken the stranglehold that the higher clergy and the warrior aristocracy held over the minds as well as the bodies of ordinary people.

Summary

Palaeontology incorporates several, overlapping, areas, the principal of which are:

Summary

This chapter deals with how our knowledge of fossils and earth and life history is applied in industry and elsewhere.

7.1 Petroleum geology

Readers interested in further details are referred to Jones (1996), Laudon (1996), Selley (1998) and Gluyas and Swarbrick (2003). Those interested in the environmental impact of petroleum exploration and reservoir exploitation are referred to Evans (1997); those interested in impact mitigation, to his discussion of BP's Wytch Farm oilfield underlying Poole Harbour, Dorset, UK, and under development using shore-based ‘extended reach’ directional drilling.

Principles and practice of petroleum geology

Play components

There are essentially three components to a successful play, namely, a working petroleum source-rock and system, to provide the petroleum charge; a reservoir, to store, and ultimately to flow, same; and a cap-rock (seal) and trap, to prevent it from escaping. Each of these play components is discussed in more detail below. A discussion of stratigraphic control on play component distribution follows.

Petroleum source-rocks and systems

Petroleum source-rocks. Petroleum source-rocks are those from which petroleum is derived. They typically consist of abundant organic matter or kerogen, that can be of either terrestrial land-plant or humic, or marine algal or sapropelic, origin. This organic matter is transformed, or matured, into oil and gas by heating on burial. The product will depend on the nature of the source-rock, and on the transformation ratio, or degree of maturation, in turn determined by burial history and by basin type. Typically, oil is generated from so-called ‘type I’ or ‘type II’ source-rocks, whose organic matter is of marine algal origin; and gas either from these same source rocks subjected to more maturation, or from ‘type III” source-rocks, whose organic matter is of terrestrial land-plant origin. Maturation and migration can be modelled using various publicly available and proprietary one-, two- and three-dimensional basin-modelling software packages.

Petroleum systems. Apetroleum system has been variously defined as ‘a dynamic petroleum generating and concentrating system functioning in geological space and time’, or ‘a pod of active source rock and the resulting oil and gas accumulations’. As recently noted by Katz and Mello, in Mello and Katz (2000), although the term has been defined, it nonetheless still appears to mean different, albeit thematically related, things to different individuals and organisations.

Summary

A decade after the appearance of the first edition, the opportunity to prepare a revised second edition has permitted me to introduce a number of changes in the text. Some of these are relatively minor revisions made in the interests of clarity and readability. Obviously, the new Bibliographical essay includes a number of important publications that appeared since my earlier work. Three changes, however, are more substantial. First, new publications on Italian education have caused me to rethink the treatment on that subject, now located in Chapter 2. Unfortunately, the story of the ‘educational revolution’ of the Italian Renaissance has become more complicated, though the revised account still maintains that a significant transformation in the nature of Italian grammar-school education took place during the fifteenth century. Second, new publications on what I have called Italian pre-humanism and on the role of ‘civic humanism’ (if any) in the development of Renaissance Italy have led to some rethinking of my earlier treatment, though I remain unconvinced that the basic idea of a historically decisive connection between political and intellectual history in Quattrocento Florence should be abandoned. As a result of these two areas of revision, the original Chapter 1 has been divided, with the new Chapter 2 beginning with the emergence of humanism as the dominant culture of the elite classes not only in Florence but throughout Italy. That emergence of humanism and the mechanisms (such as education) by which it took place are the main theme of the new Chapter 2.

Summary

This chapter essentially deals with what fossils are, how they form, how they are collected, and how they are classified and identified, described and illustrated, and curated.

Fossils

The word ‘fossil’ derives from the Latin fodere, meaning ‘to dig’. Its usage is in reference to any and all physical remains or other direct physical indications of past life. The physical remains of past life include not only what are often termed ‘body fossils’, that is, ‘hard parts’ of skeletons such as bones (Denys, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001) and shells (Meldahl, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), but also, under exceptional circumstances, ‘soft parts’ of animals (Stankiewicz and Briggs, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), parts of plants (van Bergen, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), bacteria (Liebig, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), and biomolecules such as fats, proteins and DNA (Briggs et al., in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Collins and Gernaey, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Evershed and Lockheart, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Poinar and Paabo, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Jones, 2001). Other direct physical indications of past life include ‘trace fossils’ (see separate section in Chapter 3).

The fossilisation process (taphonomy)

The fossilisation process, whereby living individual organisms or communities are transformed after death into fossils or fossil assemblages, is termed taphonomy (Fursich, in Briggs and Crowther, 1990; Allison and Briggs, 1991; Donovan, 1991; Martin, 1999; Behrensmeyer et al., in Erwin and Wing, 2000; Wilson, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001; Holz and Simoes, in Koutsoukos, 2005). In fact, a range of biological, physical and chemical processes is involved, from decomposition (Allison, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), through disarticulation, fragmentation and transportation (Anderson, in Briggs and Crowther, 2001), to compaction, thermal alteration and dissolution on burial (Briggs, in Briggs and Crowther, 1990; Tucker, in Briggs and Crowther, 1990; Jones, 1996; McNeil et al., 1996), and reworking. For a living organism to become fossilised requires that it can withstand the combined effects of these processes. In general, its chances of becoming fossilised are enhanced if it becomes buried immediately after death (and/or is otherwise protected from decomposition, perhaps by anoxic bottom conditions), and/or is and remains resistant to the destructive physical and chemical effects of the so-called diagenetic processes that enter into operation after burial (see also Sub-section 2.2.2).

Summary

Petrarch raised most of the issues of humanistic culture and set many of the directions in which it moved during the two centuries following his lifetime. He also became a famous literary personality in his own time. Nevertheless, he was a deracinated intellectual with no fixed abode and no real sense of belonging to a community. His exquisite lyric poetry and his classical learning did indeed point towards a new direction for Italian culture, but in the short run his constituency was mainly the wealthy, leisured clergymen and the secular princes whose patronage assured his material existence. What saved Petrarch's work from becoming merely a literature of the court was the adoption of his ideals by the prosperous lay intellectuals of the Italian cities, particularly Florence, which in the late fourteenth century and throughout the fifteenth century was by far the most important centre of humanistic culture. Modern scholars have probed the history of this great city, trying to understand why it outstripped all the other cities where humanism was also developing. Perhaps there is no definitive answer to the mystery of Florentine cultural leadership. Florence was by no means the only city with the wealth and the literate population needed to support the new culture. One special advantage of Florence may have been a lack. Unlike Padua, Bologna, Pisa, and several rival cities, Florence did not have a university at all until 1349. Even after that date, the local university never played a dominant role in cultural life. Hence local intellectuals were relatively free from the traditionalism and professionalism of university life.

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6 - Biostratigraphy and sequence stratigraphy

Summary

3 - Humanism and Italian society

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Index

Frontmatter

5 - Key biological events in earth history

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6 - Humanism in the late Renaissance

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Dedication 2

Introduction

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List of illustrations

1 - Introduction

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Frontmatter

References

7 - Case histories of applications of palaeontology

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Preface to the Second Edition

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2 - Fossils and fossilisation

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Index

2 - Humanism becomes dominant

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Dedication 1

Acknowledgements

Bibliographical essay

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