The analytical, data-driven palaeobiology pioneered by my father has now become a cottage industry. Much like algorithms are used in genomics to automate data analysis, a group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for example, recently announced a project called ‘PaleoDeepDive’ – a ‘statistical machine-reading and learning system, to automatically find and extract fossil-occurrence data from the scientific literature’. Palaeobiology’s success has paralleled the advent of computing and the internet, and would seem like an obvious example of the determining impact of technology on science.
Office of Strategic Communication