Two legs good, four legs bad...

From
Date
Folks,

I think trying to force palaeo into either a biological camp or into a
geological one is perhaps likely to miss some of the very real advatages of
both. Neither is intrinsically the best.

For example, I did my honours degree at Aberdeen in Zoology starting in
1990. Like all Scottish universities the course takes four rather than
three years, and some breadth to your education is encouraged. So besides
the basic biological and chemical subjects essential to the degree are did
some others - including palaeontology, but also space science, history and
philosophy of science, and computing courses. All good stuff.

Now, the point is that I learned more taxonomy in the palaeo class in six
months than I did in four years in zoology. Modern zoology really doesn't
care about whole animal "natural history"...the sorts of things we would
study under functional morphology or palaeobiology. But in palaeo I
discovered the joys of gastropod shell ornament, how bivalve shells tell
you about their lifestyles, even what a brachiopod or calcichordate was.
These are things that simply would never happen in a contemporary zoology
degree.

This converted me, and I became more interested in palaeobiological
questions. I did my honours project on starfish predation of brachiopods -
inspired by a recent paper by Gale and Donovan on the post-Permian decline
of the brachiopods.

Talking with my palaeo lecturers afterwards, I found that they chose palaeo
for the same reasons I have - it is pretty well the only way to do plain
old natural history. Okay, so you need to throw a few rocks in once in a
while, but basically this stuff is linear descent from Gilbert White,
Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. And I approve of that.

So let's not be too hasty about jumping to the other camp. We might not be
made to feel all that welcome.

All the best,

Neale.

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>From  Neale Monks' Macintosh PowerBook, at...

Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, SW7 5BD
Internet: N.Monks@nhm.ac.uk, Telephone: 0171-938-9007
Telephone (international): 0044 171 938 9345

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