Fossils and tectonics

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Abstract
‘Fossils can date rocks’ is a statement recognizable by all earth scientists, but all too many geologists stop there in their appreciation of how palaeontology can help them to solve their other problems, or of how to use it as an independent check of hypotheses reached by other methods. This thematic of papers, deriving from the Geological Society meeting organised on the same topic in February 1985, aims to help bridge the divide that exists between palaeontologists on the one hand and earth scientists of many other disciplines on the other. The histories of geology and palaeontology were intimately intertwined until the last two or three decades. More recently, the sheer proliferation of literature and the growth of geological subdisciplines have perhaps displaced palaeontological data from the main stream of geological reasoning. Newer fields have apparently offered an objectivity that the deliberations of the palaeontologist may have seemed to lack. During this time British palaeontologists have established their own very successful Association, but the growth of palaeobiology and other aspects of the science may still obscure the geological roots of the subject, or its applicability to current problems of, for instance, structural geology. In short, the role of fossils has often tended to become a routine service in the dating of rocks—or just one of a series of potential‘event stratigraphic criteria’. We regard this as unfortunate. The fossil record has several advantages which make it particularly important in the interpretation of structural and geotectonic problems: 1. The information from

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