A moderately comprehensive reference handbook covering the most important paleontological taxa, terms, concepts, and localities, this book is written primarily for general readers and beginning students in the field. My professional experience lies in technical writing and in teaching literature and history, with a lifelong interest in paleontology inspired by Professor Charles Higgins at UC Davis and by studying the geology collection in UC Berkeley’s beautiful Bacon Hall before it was demolished in 1961. Using the essays of science writers like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Gould, and E.O. Wilson in my composition classes in the 1980s, I made critical thinking and the evolution of life on Earth the center of my teaching. An interesting technical writing project in the early 1990s showed me the lack of a dictionary like this, and I began the groundwork for a good reference work as I directed student research in the history of life in my writing courses. Retiring from teaching in 2014, I have widened my understanding of paleontology with intensive study in the last 5 years. <...>

Over the decades since the first edition of our dictionary was published, satellite observations of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere have grown increasingly important and increasingly valuable to geologists and Earth scientists. There are now so many satellites in orbit above us that it would be impossible to describe them all in a volume of this size. Nevertheless, I have done my best by adding a substantial number of new satellite entries, and in many cases links to web sites, describing those that seem to me the most relevant and interesting.
I have also updated many of the entries for stages. Again, it would be impractical to include all the stage names from every part of the world, but I have added quite a number.
I hope you find the dictionary useful and its entries clear.

Vallée (1998) indicated that few exploration and mining companies have explicit and systematic quality-assurance policies, and identified three main approaches: laissez-fair, catch-as-catch-can, and systematic quality control, the latter being very uncommon. In the author’s experience, this situation has not significantly improved in the intervening twelve years.

There is an ever-growing wealth of mammalian fossil material being collected from palaeontological and archaeological sites in southern Africa. This reference provides comprehensive information on the taxonomy and distribution in time and space of all currently recognised southern African fossil mammals. After an introductory background chapter on southern Africa, mammals, sites and dating, the following chapters are presented by epoch, covering the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene. Individual maps provide information on where in the landscape specific taxa have been found, and a comprehensive index lists all the fauna and site locations. It ends with a chapter on how the book can be used, and lines of future research. Collecting a vast amount of information together in an accessible format, this is an essential reference for non-specialist taxonomists and palaeontologists, as well as for those using fossil data for other applications, such as archaeology, neontology and nature conservation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.