FUTURE OF PALEONTOLOGY — CUSHMAN 319 



fossil faunas and floras of past ages, but will make possible a much 

 greater clarity of vision in making the past live again. 



For all the great progress in the past, the paleontologist of the 

 future should be especially trained and educated. Perhaps too often 

 in the past paleontology has been merely a side issue, particularly as 

 it is used by a geologist who has looked for fossils to give him a clue 

 to the age of the formations with which he was working. The fossils 

 meant simply marks or forms in the rocks, to which he attached names 

 for future reference in correlation. 



As an ideal, the paleontologist of the future should be trained as a 

 zoologist or botanist or both, so that he may be familiar with the ani- 

 mals and plants of the present day. With this background he will 

 be ready to understand the relationship, structure, and development 

 of the animals and plants whose remains he finds in the rocks. They 

 will represent definite characters which will allow him to classify and 

 deal with them in their true zoological or botanical relationships. 

 With such a training, the future paleontologist will have full knowledge 

 of types of plants or animals with which he works and can visualize 

 the living forms from the fossil remains that he has before him. 



With greater ease of travel, and larger collections from all parts of 

 the earth, the specialist in any group will be able to consider it as a 

 whole, trace its evolution throughout geologic time, and chart its 

 migrations. Although faunal study of small areas will necessarily 

 precede, we may look forward to the time when a comprehensive study 

 of a group from all parts of the world will be possible and a much 

 fuller understanding of its developments and relationships will be 

 achieved than can be attained at present. As wider collections are 

 made, many of the gaps that now exist will be filled in and the missing 

 links in much of the evolutionary history of plants and animals will 

 be discovered to make a complete whole. 



Although the biologist dealing with life processes gives us much 

 information on the actual working of evolution, it is the paleontol- 

 ogist who must, by a study of the records of the past, bring to light 

 the pathways that evolution has taken up to the present. For the 

 best realization of these, the paleontologist will collect not only the 

 adult stages characteristic of the species but all the developmental 

 stages possible as well, to give a complete series. 



Material for the study of the more detailed problems of evolution 

 may be found in many surface outcrops, but complete sections, several 

 hundreds of feet in length or even much longer, may be obtained by 

 the use of cores. Those who have worked with the microfossils of 

 such cores must have been aware of the changes that take place in a 

 single species during the deposition represented by the core or that 

 part of it in which the species occurs. The relationships of species 

 and their derivation, one from another, by the incoming of new charac- 



