The future of the fossil record: Paleontology in the 21st century.

In the past two decades, great progress in the biological sciences has come from the incorporation of history in understanding basic mechanisms in fields ranging from ecology and conservation biology to physiology and developmental biology. This conceptual expansion has been promoted in large part by theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in two seemingly disparate fields. The first field is molecular biology, which opens powerful new windows on phylogenetic relationships, genome structure and function, and developmental mechanisms. The second field is paleontology, which affords a unique, direct, and expanding source of information into the anatomies, ecologies, physiologies, and spatial and temporal dynamics of past life. The fossil record is certainly rich in incident and rife with bizarre players, but an extensive body of research now treats the fossil record as a biological laboratory for rigorously framing and testing hypotheses at the intersection of paleontology with diverse disciplines across the full range of timescales encompassed by the earth and life sciences. This Special Feature collects some of the exciting and important new directions and insights, from the beginnings of life on Earth to the immediate precursor to the present-day biota (Fig. 1). Paleontology informs the natural sciences by providing unique sources of data on important phenotypes and on the spatial and temporal dynamics of biological events and processes. Accordingly, we organize these contributions in terms of the important phenotypes contained in the fossil record, and the analysis of dynamics of species, clades, and communities in both space and time.