Terrestrial Ecosystems Through Time

Breathtaking in scope, this is the first survey of the entire

ecological history of life on land—from the earliest traces

of terrestrial organisms over 400 million years ago to the

beginning of human agriculture. By providing myriad insights

into the unique ecological information contained in the

fossil record, it establishes a new and ambitious basis for

the study of evolutionary paleoecology of land ecosystems.

A joint undertaking of the Evolution of Terrestrial

Ecosystems Consortium at the National Museum of Natural

History, Smithsonian Institution, and twenty-six additional

researchers, this book begins with four chapters that lay out

the theoretical background and methodology of the science of

evolutionary paleoecology. Included are a comprehensive

review of the taphonomy and paleoenvironmental settings of

fossil deposits as well as guidelines for developing

ecological characterizations of extinct organisms and the

communities in which they lived. The remaining three

chapters treat the history of terrestrial ecosystems through

geological time, emphasizing how ecological interactions have

changed, the rate and tempo of ecosystem change, the role of

exogenous "forcing factors" in generating ecological change,

and the effect of ecological factors on the evolution of

biological diversity.

The six principal authors of this volume are all associated

with the Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems program at the

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.