Paleontology and Ecology: Their Common Origins and Later Split

Abstract

Today paleontology and ecology exist as separate disciplines, however for much of the history of research on these topics that was not the case. The splitting of ‘science’ into multiple discrete disciplines is mainly a product of the nineteenth century – when both paleontology and ecology acquired their names. To provide a historical background to the interrelationship between these two areas I consider four illustrative figures from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century and discuss the extent to which these two areas of science interacted in their attempts to understand the world. I suggest that the rise of Earth Systems Science in the final few decades of the twentieth century shows one way of returning to a less compartmentalized approach to studying the Earth and illustrates the advantages to be gained from breaking down the boundaries between traditional late nineteenth and twentieth century scientific disciplines. I argue that the more geological aspects of natural history have often been overlooked by historians looking for the origins of the ideas that were to help form academic ecology during the twentieth century. Many key ecological ideas can be found in the work of the ‘earth scientists’ discussed in this chapter. For example fossil data was required to establish the fact of natural species extinction – an important ecological idea.

‘Why run the Earth and life sciences together? I would ask, why have they been torn apart by the ruthless dissection of science into separate and blinkered disciplines.’

James Lovelock (1995)