What Is Paleontology? Research Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Paleontology is the scientific study of the history of life on Earth as recorded in fossils — the preserved remains, impressions, or traces of organisms that lived in the geologic past. Paleontologists ask what an organism looked like, how it lived, how it is related to other organisms living and extinct, and how life as a whole has changed across the roughly 3.5-billion-year span of Earth’s biological history, including the major extinctions and radiations that punctuate that record. Because fossils are preserved in rock, paleontology sits directly at the intersection of biology and geology: it uses biological theory (evolution, anatomy, ecology) to interpret organisms, and geological theory (stratigraphy, sedimentology, geochronology) to place them in time and environmental context. CASRAI’s companion guides to what biology studies and what geology studies cover each parent discipline in full; this guide covers the field that sits between them.

What Paleontology Actually Studies

At its core, paleontology asks a recurring set of questions regardless of the organism or time period involved: What was this organism, and how is it related to other organisms? How did it grow, move, feed, and reproduce, and what can its anatomy tell us about how it lived? What was the environment it lived in, and how did that environment — and the organism’s place in it — change over time? And what do patterns across many fossils, from a single bed to the entire fossil record, reveal about the larger history of life: the origin of major groups, the pace of evolutionary change, and the causes and consequences of mass extinctions?

• Systematics and taxonomy — identifying fossil organisms, classifying them, and reconstructing their evolutionary relationships to living and other extinct groups.
• Taphonomy — the study of what happens to an organism between death and discovery as a fossil: decay, burial, and the processes that determine what does and doesn’t get preserved, and how faithfully a fossil assemblage reflects the living community it came from.
• Biostratigraphy and geochronology — using fossils, in combination with radiometric and other dating methods, to determine the age of the rock layers that contain them and to correlate rock sequences across regions.
• Paleoecology and paleoenvironmental reconstruction — inferring ancient habitats, climates, and ecological relationships (predation, diet, community structure) from fossil evidence.
• Macroevolution and extinction — using the long timescale of the fossil record, which living organisms alone cannot provide, to study rates of evolutionary change, the origin of major body plans, and the causes and recovery patterns of mass extinction events.

Paleontology’s Relationship to Its Neighboring Disciplines

Paleontology’s boundaries are porous, and a great deal of active research sits explicitly at its intersections with other fields:

• Biology supplies the theoretical core paleontology interprets fossils through — evolutionary theory, comparative anatomy, systematics, and developmental biology all apply directly to extinct organisms, just with an incomplete, time-compressed sample. See CASRAI’s guide to what biology studies, and specifically what evolutionary biology studies for the theory paleontology draws on most heavily, and what developmental biology studies for the growth-and-form questions that inform how paleontologists interpret fossil ontogeny.
• Geology supplies the physical framework — stratigraphy, sedimentology, and geochronology determine where a fossil sits in time and what environment it was buried in, and most paleontology graduate programs are housed in geology or earth-science departments for exactly this reason. See CASRAI’s guide to what geology studies.
• Archaeology shares fieldwork techniques and, in the case of human fossils, subject matter with paleontology, but the two fields are distinct: archaeology studies human material culture and behavior, typically within the last few million years and often within recorded or near-recorded history, while paleontology studies the biological history of life across all of geologic time. See CASRAI’s guide to archaeology for that distinction in more depth.
• Geophysics contributes subsurface imaging and dating-adjacent physical methods — paleomagnetism in particular is used to date and correlate fossil-bearing rock sequences. See CASRAI’s guide to geophysics.

Major Sub-Disciplines Within Paleontology

Paleontology is typically divided by the kind of organism or evidence studied, though most active research programs combine more than one of these:

• Vertebrate paleontology — the study of fossil animals with backbones: fish, amphibians, reptiles (including dinosaurs), birds, and mammals. This is the most publicly visible subfield, though not the largest by fossil volume.
• Invertebrate paleontology — the study of fossil animals without backbones (mollusks, arthropods, corals, and many other groups), which make up the overwhelming majority of the fossil record and are the primary tool for biostratigraphy.
• Paleobotany — the study of fossil plants, including their role in reconstructing ancient climates and vegetation and their contribution to the evolution of terrestrial ecosystems.
• Micropaleontology — the study of microscopic fossils (foraminifera, diatoms, pollen, and similar organisms), heavily used in petroleum exploration, oceanography, and high-resolution climate and biostratigraphic work because of how abundant and widely distributed microfossils are.
• Paleobiology — a more theory-oriented subfield focused on the biological processes — evolution, ecology, functional morphology — that fossils record, rather than on describing and classifying fossils for their own sake; the term is often used interchangeably with paleontology in a research context.
• Ichnology — the study of trace fossils (footprints, burrows, feeding marks) rather than body fossils, which can preserve behavioral information body fossils cannot.
• Paleoclimatology — overlapping with geology and atmospheric science, the use of fossil and geochemical proxies to reconstruct past climate.

Who Funds Paleontology Research

This is the piece a general encyclopedia entry on paleontology typically skips, and it matters for understanding the field as a research enterprise rather than only as a body of knowledge. In the United States, paleontology research is funded through several federal and private routes:

• The National Science Foundation (NSF) — within NSF’s Directorate for Geosciences (GEO), the Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) has historically been the primary federal funder of paleontology and paleobiology research, through program areas covering sedimentary geology and paleobiology — work examining the evolution of life, ecology, and environments through the pre-Holocene fossil and sedimentary record. NSF also funds paleontology-adjacent work (systematics, evolutionary biology, phylogenetics) through its Directorate for Biological Sciences. NSF’s specific program names and division structure change periodically, so a researcher planning an application should verify the current program scope directly against NSF’s own current guidance rather than treating any specific program name as necessarily still open.
• NASA — through its Astrobiology Program, NASA funds research relevant to the origin and early evolution of life on Earth, including deep-time paleontological evidence bearing on the fossil record’s oldest, most biologically ambiguous material, where the questions overlap with the search for life elsewhere.
• The Smithsonian Institution — through the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian is one of the world’s largest paleontology research institutions, both conducting its own research and curating fossil collections that other researchers rely on; it also administers postdoctoral and predoctoral fellowships that support paleontological research.
• The National Geographic Society — a well-known private funder of paleontological fieldwork and exploration, through its grants programs supporting expeditions and fossil-collection research.
• University and natural history museums — major natural history museums (in addition to the Smithsonian) are themselves significant funders and hosts of paleontological research through their own research staff, collections, and fellowship programs, reflecting how much of the field’s basic infrastructure — fossil collections built up over more than a century — lives in museums rather than university departments alone.

None of this is an exhaustive funding directory — program names, paylines, and eligibility rules change, and a researcher planning an actual application should verify current program scope directly against NSF’s, NASA’s, or the relevant museum’s own current guidance rather than treating this summary as current as of any specific application date.

Typical Research Methods, Tools, and Equipment

Paleontology research spans fieldwork, museum collections work, and laboratory analysis, and the specific mix in use varies by subfield:

• Field prospecting and excavation — systematically searching exposed rock for fossils, then carefully excavating, jacketing (plaster-and-burlap field jackets for larger specimens), and recording the precise stratigraphic and geographic context each fossil was found in, since that context is often as scientifically valuable as the fossil itself.
• Fossil preparation — removing rock matrix from a fossil in the laboratory, using tools ranging from hand picks and airscribes to acid preparation, to reveal the specimen for study without damaging it.
• Comparative anatomy and morphometrics — systematically measuring and comparing fossil anatomy, increasingly using digital and statistical (geometric morphometric) methods, to classify specimens and reconstruct evolutionary relationships.
• CT scanning and 3D imaging — computed tomography and surface scanning let researchers examine internal fossil structure non-destructively and build digital models for analysis, comparison, and biomechanical simulation without further preparing or damaging the original specimen.
• Cladistic and phylogenetic analysis — computational methods, shared with evolutionary biology, for reconstructing evolutionary relationships among fossil (and living) taxa from shared anatomical characters.
• Radiometric and other geochronological dating — determining the age of the rock layers containing a fossil, using methods shared with geology, since a fossil’s scientific value depends heavily on knowing precisely when it lived.
• Stable isotope and geochemical analysis — analyzing the chemistry of fossil material (bone, shell, tooth enamel) to infer diet, climate, and physiology, a method shared with geochemistry.
• Museum collections research — much paleontological work is done on specimens already collected and curated in museum collections rather than on newly excavated material, making collections access and data-sharing a genuine part of the field’s research infrastructure.

Career and Training Pathways

Academic and museum research careers in paleontology typically require a PhD, most often earned in a geology, earth-science, or biology department (paleontology itself is rarely a standalone department) with a paleontology-focused advisor and dissertation. Graduate training combines coursework in geology and evolutionary biology with a original research dissertation, typically including substantial fieldwork and, for many students, a period of museum-collections-based research. Career paths after the PhD include academic faculty positions (usually in geology, earth-science, or biology departments), curatorial and research positions at natural history museums, and research positions at federal agencies and geological surveys. Some paleontology training and skills — fossil preparation, collections management, geologic mapping — also support careers that don’t require a PhD, including museum preparator and collections-manager roles and positions in the environmental and energy sectors that draw on biostratigraphy.

The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) and the Paleontological Society (PS) are the field’s two best-known professional societies in the United States: SVP focuses on vertebrate paleontology specifically and publishes the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, while the Paleontological Society serves the broader field and publishes the Journal of Paleontology and Paleobiology. Both hold annual meetings that function as the discipline’s primary venues for presenting new research.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between paleontology and archaeology?
Paleontology studies the biological history of life across all of geologic time, using fossils. Archaeology studies human material culture and behavior, typically within the last few million years and often within recorded history, using artifacts. The two fields can overlap on human and near-human fossil material, but their core subject matter and methods differ.

What is the difference between paleontology and geology?
Geology studies the Earth’s rocks, structures, and physical history broadly. Paleontology is more specifically the study of fossils and the history of life, and relies on geological methods (stratigraphy, dating) to place fossils in time. Most paleontology graduate programs are housed within geology or earth-science departments for this reason.

Do you need a PhD to work in paleontology?
For an independent research or curatorial career, generally yes. Some related roles — museum fossil preparation, collections management, field technician work — are accessible with a bachelor’s or master’s degree.

How is paleontology research typically funded in the United States?
Mainly through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences (with paleontology-adjacent support also available through NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences), NASA’s Astrobiology Program for deep-time origin-of-life questions, and the Smithsonian Institution and other major natural history museums, which both conduct and fund fossil research through their own collections and fellowship programs — see the funding section above for how they divide the field’s territory.

What is the oldest fossil evidence of life on Earth?
The oldest widely accepted fossil evidence places life’s origin at roughly 3.5 billion years ago, though claims for even older evidence exist and remain actively debated within the field, illustrating how much of paleontology’s oldest-evidence questions stay genuinely open research problems rather than settled facts.

Where Paleontology Fits Among the Sciences

For a broader map of how paleontology relates to the full set of major scientific disciplines — from physics and chemistry through to biology and the other Earth sciences — see CASRAI’s branches of science guide, the anchor index for this whole series of discipline deep-dives. Related discipline guides in this series include CASRAI’s guide to archaeology, guide to geophysics, and guide to meteorology.