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Introduction to Paleontology
Introduction to Paleontology provides a walk back in time through Earth’s history from a lifeless planet to initial bursts of life, from extinctions to life again, and ultimately to our world today. Relying considerably on the National Museum of Natural History‘s curatorial expertise and extensive collections of paleontological fossils, maps, records, and images—with more than 2,500 gorgeous and unique visuals—you’ll see the world as it’s never before been envisioned. Additionally, the expert curators at the Smithsonian helped to shape the structure and content of the course, and reviewed each lecture against the most up-to-date information and understanding of paleontology today.
13 pages, Audiobook
First published January 1, 2016
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About the author
Stuart Sutherland
31 books18 followersBritish Psychologist Norman Stuart Sutherland (26 March 1927 – 8 November 1998), always known professionally as Stuart Sutherland, was a British psychologist and writer.
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.
Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at Oxford for his DPhil which he took in zoology under the supervision of J. Z. Young. He held a lecturing post at Oxford before moving in 1964 to the recently opened University of Sussex as the founding Professor and head of its Laboratory of Experimental Psychology; with the young colleagues he appointed, he rapidly built an international reputation for Sussex in this field.
Among psychologists, Sutherland is best known for his theoretical and empirical work in comparative psychology, particularly in relation to visual pattern recognition and discrimination learning. In the 1950s and 1960s he carried out numerous experiments on rats but also on other species such as octopus; the two-factor theory of discrimination learning that he developed with Nicholas Mackintosh was an important step in the rehabilitation of a cognitive approach to animal learning after the dominance of strict behaviourism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also interested in human perception and cognition, and in 1992 he published Irrationality: The enemy within, a lay reader's guide to the psychology of cognitive biases and common failures of human judgement.
Among a wider public, Sutherland is most famous for his 1976 autobiography Breakdown, detailing his struggles with manic depression. A second edition of Breakdown was published in 1995. Stuart Sutherland died from a heart attack in November 1998.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 17, 2024
The first half is pretty technical explaining the tools, taxonomy and other stuff like chemistry. The second half takes a tour from past to present and highlights different evolutionary stories like whales, flowers and grasses. Overall pretty good course that is pretty reliant on visuals.
April 27, 2020
It's more of a soundbite intro to paleontology. I listened to the audio version, but I think to get more out of it you have to go through video lectures. But the big problem with this course is that the structure and organization of lectures is muddled. It would have been better to devote first half of the course to methodology and some theoretical and conceptual ideas in the field (a good explanation of radioactive dating and some other molecular techniques, a quick run through basic building blocks of evolution, explanation of speciation and classification of organisms, etc.), then give a chronological history of life on earth for the second part of the course.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews