By Louis-Philippe Bateman, MSc student at McGill University

A Return to Osteomancy

If you lived in Ancient Greece and wanted to know what the future held, you might have visited an oracle. You would enter a shadowy chamber lit by oil lamps and pose your question to a robed figure. That person would perform a ritual involving chicken bones and return with a cryptic prophecy — hopefully one that didn’t involve killing your father and marrying your mother.

Nowadays, little has changed except the setting. If you want to know the future of the world’s ecosystems, you enter a narrow, windowless office and consult an underpaid grad student in an old conference T-shirt. That poor grad student spends months coaxing a large silicon brain in strange tongues — R, Python, and Julia — to produce a “model” predicting what bleak future awaits the natural world.

You might be surprised to learn that some people think we should return to consulting bones — not through mysticism, but through science. This is the idea behind the emerging field of conservation paleobiology, which contends that the fossil record can help predict, or at least inform, the future of biodiversity, ecosystems, and Earth systems.

The Conference

Full disclosure: I am one of these heretics. That is what brought me and 100-odd palaeoecologists, paleontologists, historical biologists, and nerds to Zürich in late July, for the 4^th Crossing the Palaeoecological-Ecological Gap and 3^rd Conservation Paleobiology Symposium (CPEG-CPB), which were jointly held at the University of Zürich. My participation in this event was generously supported by a QCBS Graduate Excellence Award (and thankfully so, considering how expensive Zürich was). The conference was a blast. I mingled with colleagues from around the world, all striving to harness the fossil record to improve our forecasts for the future. I even presented my own contributions to the field and got feedback from world experts. I got to attend four days of brilliant talks, posters, and workshops, and experienced the joys of coffee-fueled jetlagged socialization.

The conference also gave me my first broad view of the field, its accomplishments, its potential, and its limitations. This includes a few optimistic application scenarios. Lucia Snyderman, a PhD student in England, measured stable isotopes in pelican fossils to identify potential Dalmatian pelican reintroduction sites in English wetlands. Prof. Hervé Bocherens, from the University of Tübingen, measured stable isotopes from diet in ancient and recent European bison bones and found that the species preferred open areas before widespread human expansion that forced them into woodlands. Prof. Ruth Thurstan, from the University of Exeter, used old news reports from the 19^th century to estimate how fish populations have collapsed in the past hundred years.

Promises and Perils

Why study the past to understand the future? There are more reasons than I can cover here, but a few come up repeatedly in debates on conservation paleobiology. First, it’s difficult to detect and analyze ecological change using short time series. The fossil record, by contrast, spans hundreds of millions of years. Second, gathering new long-term ecological data is slow and costly, whereas large databases of fossil occurrences and traits already exist and are increasingly standardized. Third, even Earth’s most “pristine” ecosystems have been altered by human activity, leaving us with no true baselines for comparison — a problem deep time doesn’t share. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, many key biological insights simply wouldn’t exist without fossils. Darwin’s theory of evolution would have been far weaker without them, and conservationists might not grasp that mass extinctions are possible if the fossil record hadn’t shown that they’ve already happened at least five times.

These criticisms are perhaps unfair to levy against a young field. However, the field will have to pay heed to these problems if it wants to progress and become more useful. There are many pathways to make research more applicable. This includes making straightforward policy recommendations, publishing in open access journals to make conservation paleobiological work more accessible, adopting the lingo of conservation biology, and collaborating with ecologists that work in the present day.

Bridging the Gap

This short article is a small effort on my part to narrow the gap between paleontologists and ecologists. In fact, I compel you to integrate the past into your work. There are many ways you can help narrow it to. You can cite conservation paleobiological studies to support your points. You can integrate deep time and historical data into your analyses thanks to the multiple publicly available databases like NEOTOMA, NOW, the Paleobiology Database, and the BioDeepTime database. You could maybe attend the next CPEG-CPB meeting in two years (registration is free for students and postdocs and you can attend online). In other words, what are you waiting for to (partially) reject modernity and embrace the (deep time) tradition?