Teaching Paleontology: From the Idiographic to the Nomothetic

For most of the twentieth century, paleontology instruction focused on excessive memorization of taxa, morphology, and stratigraphic ranges. Paleontology classes were notorious for their dull "idiographic" approach that focused on details and ignored the broader picture. The "Paleobiology Revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s also changed the way paleontology was taught. Starting with the 1972 Raup and Stanley textbook (which was all theoretical principles with no coverage of the taxonomy or morphology the major phyla of invertebrate fossils), paleontology instruction has gradually shifted toward a more dynamic, "law-like" or "nomothetic" approach. This emphasis on ideas, concepts, and controversies over pure memorization of names and dates has made paleontology instruction much more interesting and relevant for today's undergraduate geology majors, the majority of whom will not become professional paleontologists and don't need a huge number of taxonomic names to do their jobs in other fields of geology. Nonetheless, some basic information about the major phyla of fossils is essential, or the theoretical ideas are empty of real content. My own paleontology textbook, Bringing Fossils to Life (McGraw-Hill, 1998, 2004) attempted to bridge that gap by giving both the theoretical and the taxonomic topics roughly equal coverage. In my own lab exercises, I threw out my traditional memorization-heavy approach 15 years ago. Now each phylum is briefly introduced, complemented by outstanding video footage of living representatives. We spend most of our lab time solving a practical problem using the phylum as an example: paleobathymetry of benthic forams, ontogeny of trilobites, population variation of brachiopods, paleoecology of mollusks, and so on. As a result, my paleontology class has always been very popular, and nearly every geology major takes it despite its elective status. I've also seen a very high number of students converted to paleontology from other fields by using this approach.