What does paleontologist mean?

Definitions for paleontologist
pa·le·on·tol·o·gist

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word paleontologist.

Princeton's WordNet

  1. paleontologist, palaeontologist, fossilistnoun

    a specialist in paleontology

Wiktionary

  1. paleontologistnoun

    one who studies paleontology

Wikipedia

  1. paleontologist

    Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments (their paleoecology). Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century. The term has been used since 1822 formed from Greek παλαιός ('palaios', "old, ancient"), ὄν ('on', (gen. 'ontos'), "being, creature"), and λόγος ('logos', "speech, thought, study").Paleontology lies on the border between biology and geology, but differs from archaeology in that it excludes the study of anatomically modern humans. It now uses techniques drawn from a wide range of sciences, including biochemistry, mathematics, and engineering. Use of all these techniques has enabled paleontologists to discover much of the evolutionary history of life, almost all the way back to when Earth became capable of supporting life, nearly 4 billion years ago. As knowledge has increased, paleontology has developed specialised sub-divisions, some of which focus on different types of fossil organisms while others study ecology and environmental history, such as ancient climates. Body fossils and trace fossils are the principal types of evidence about ancient life, and geochemical evidence has helped to decipher the evolution of life before there were organisms large enough to leave body fossils. Estimating the dates of these remains is essential but difficult: sometimes adjacent rock layers allow radiometric dating, which provides absolute dates that are accurate to within 0.5%, but more often paleontologists have to rely on relative dating by solving the "jigsaw puzzles" of biostratigraphy (arrangement of rock layers from youngest to oldest). Classifying ancient organisms is also difficult, as many do not fit well into the Linnaean taxonomy classifying living organisms, and paleontologists more often use cladistics to draw up evolutionary "family trees". The final quarter of the 20th century saw the development of molecular phylogenetics, which investigates how closely organisms are related by measuring the similarity of the DNA in their genomes. Molecular phylogenetics has also been used to estimate the dates when species diverged, but there is controversy about the reliability of the molecular clock on which such estimates depend.

ChatGPT

  1. paleontologist

    A paleontologist is a scientist who studies the history of life on Earth through the examination of plant and animal fossils. They investigate extinct species, evolution and changes in the environment, using knowledge in biology, geology, ecology and more to understand the processes that have led to the development and diversity of life forms over millions of years.

Webster Dictionary

  1. Paleontologistnoun

    one versed in paleontology

  2. Etymology: [Cf. F. palontologiste.]

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of paleontologist in Chaldean Numerology is: 7

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of paleontologist in Pythagorean Numerology is: 9

Examples of paleontologist in a Sentence

  1. Fox News:

    I got a T-Rex skull. That’s Stan. As a matter of fact, so Stan was the most complete T-Rex skull ever found by a paleontologist, a young paleontologist and his name was Stan. So, this T-Rex head was named after him, pretty cool and bada --, is n’t it ?

  2. Dwayne Johnson:

    I got a T-Rex skull. That’s Stan. As a matter of fact, so Stan was the most complete T. Rex skull ever found by a paleontologist, a young paleontologist and his name was Stan. So, this T. Rex head was named after him, pretty cool and bad a** isn’t it?

  3. Betsy Lauppe Rhodes:

    Because of this, the project team included a paleontologist who would monitor excavations and document and preserve anything we found, what we were not expecting was this many fossils, of this variety. That was a complete surprise.

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"paleontologist." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 18 Mar. 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/paleontologist>.

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