Team:

• Letizia DI BELLA
• Fabrizio LIRER
• Massimo MARCHESI
• Johannes PIGNATTI
• Marco ROMANO
• Raffaele SARDELLA

Topics:

Paleontology is that branch of Earth Sciences and Natural Sciences sensu lato that deals with the study of life in the past to obtain central information on key themes, including organic evolution on our planet, the biology and ecology of organisms of the past, the history of life, taphonomy, the distribution of organisms over geological time (paleobiogeography), the great biotic crises and related mass extinctions and many other related issues. 

Historically, paleontology has been a pillar of the geological sciences, if we consider the central importance of fossils in the reading and organization of the geological record of sedimentary rocks, as well as in the development of the theory of evolution, and therefore of scientific and philosophical thought understood in modern sense.

Due to its multidisciplinary character, paleontology is configured as a border discipline between the geological sciences, understood in their entire multidisciplinary corpus, and the biological sciences, with a process of 'reciprocal illumination' where the study of current organisms and processes allow inferences to be made on those of the past and vice versa, with paleoenvironmental and paleoecological reconstruction and predictive models for the future. The members of the group conduct research on a wide spectrum of paleontological topics in the field of both invertebrates and vertebrates, with systematic, taxonomic-descriptive, phylogenetic, taphonomic, paleoecological and paleobiogeographic studies, with particular interest in the geological evolution of the Mediterranean area.