Peking University

Paleontology and Stratigraphy

This discipline is mainly about the study of sedimentary stratigraphy, environmental change in geological history, history of biodiversity, and evolution of organisms and environment. It combines theories, technologies and methodologies in Geology, Biology and Environmental Science to build a high-resolution stratigraphic framework, thus laying a foundation for regional geological survey. Through the study of morphology, histology and comparative anatomy of fossils, it aims at discovering life cycles in geological history, exploring the origin and evolution of biodiversity, as well as investigating theoretical problems of biological evolution. This discipline encompasses several fields such as Geobiology, Evolutionary Biology, Stratigraphy, Sedimentology and Ancient Environments, and the present research directions include Sedimentary Stratigraphy, Precambrian Geobiology, Paleozoic Invertebrates and Stratigraphy, Early Vascular Plants, Mesozoic Stratigraphy and Vertebrates, Cenozoic Ancient Environments and Paleoceanography. Geobiology, as an emerging research direction, is mainly concerned with the systematic study of fossils and sedimentary records in geological history by integrating paleontologic, sedimentologic and biogeochemical methods, the analysis of the role of biological evolutionary events in the Earth’s environmental change, and the exploration of the evolution of the Earth’s surface. Its objectives are to understand biodiversity change through geological history, and the interaction between organisms and environment, thus providing a basis for making predictions of future global climate and environmental changes.