Question: what is a palaeontologist

Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 17 Jun 2010:

A palaeontologist is someone who studies ancient life on Earth (an archaeologist studies human life- palaeontologists go MUCH further back in time). Most people think palaeontologists are only interested in dinosaurs but that’s not true! There are about 600 million years of history of animal and plant life on Earth and dinosaurs were only around for 186 million years (still a long time I know!)

I study organisms that lived over 500 million years ago (embryos of ancient marine animals) and I have friends working on trilobites (ancient marine arthropods), forams (tiny shelled sea-creatures) and loads of other weird and wonderful organisms that look nothing like the animals we know today!

We look at ancient organisms, which make up The Fossil Record, to see what life was like through time. We use the Fossil Record as a tool to better understand evolution. And we do like dinos too!