Royal fossils: The Royal Society and progress in palaeontology

The study of the remains of past life is a relatively young discipline, and one that has been defined partly by conflicting demands placed on it by both the life and Earth sciences. Fellows of The Royal Society have made critical contributions both to the growth of material knowledge of the subject and to the expansion of its theoretical basis, especially in the formative decades at the beginning of the 19th century. In particular, British palaeontologists and stratigraphers were pre-eminent in the shift away from viewing the Earth as a young creation conforming to the account in Genesis and towards the modern view of it as an ancient and dynamic system with a distinct history. Despite these early Earth science interests, palaeobiological subjects were also soon a topic of research, ranging from the reconstruction of ancient ecologies to the description of extinct organisms such as the dinosaurs. Nevertheless, palaeontology has notoriously failed to make signal contributions to evolutionary theory and the recent development of areas where palaeontology does have a unique imput to make, such as the global patterns of biodiversity through time and the controversy over mass extinction, has largely been a North American concern. British palaeontologists have, however, made fundamental contributions to the study of major evolutionary radiations, and this tradition is well represented in the current research interests of extant Fellows. Palaeontology remains a poorly defined discipline with little sense of an overarching paradigm, but one important future prospect probably lies with the revival of evolutionary morphology and development as neontological subjects.