Roy Plotnick has a new blog post over on Medium.  In this post, he discusses modern paleontology.  Here’s a hint… it’s not your grandfather’s paleontology.  The tools and the analysis have changed much over time and technology is more and more important in understanding the history of life.

Paleontology, like most other fields of science, has been transformed by the advent of the high-speed computer, large databases, and sophisticated analytical equipment. Instead of being “old and archaic,” as it was derisively described to my colleague Jackie Wittmer Malinowski, paleontology is a modern science, eager to adopt the latest technology. In some cases, it has even been ahead of the curve. A 1969 paper by David Raup and Dolf Seilacher, on a computer model of animal movement, has been identified as one of the first examples of research into artificial life.