Re: Are zoologist able to use fossils to help them understand animals?

Dear ?,

Certainly - fossil finds such as dinosaur bones can help zoologists in two 
important ways - they help us to understand more about the animals that 
produced the fossils and about what the world was like in the ancient times 
these animals lived, and they help us to understand how the animals we see  
around us today evolved.

A good example is of the many unusual fossil fish we know about that are 
close relatives to the large land animals we see around us today. The 
reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds that are alive today, along with 
extinct animals like dinosaurs, are all related and part of a group, the 
tetrapods, which has been amazingly succesful. The closest living relatives 
of this group are two types of unusual fish - the coelecanths and the 
lungfish, but neither are very similar to tetrapods - they are both clearly  
fish!

Palaeontologists (the people who do palaeontology, the study of fossils and 
fossil organisms) known many other fish related to the coelecanths and 
lungfish (we know this because they share many characteristics of both 
these fish, especially unusual fish with fleshy bases, called lobe fins, 
which evolved into the limbs (arms, legs and wings) of tetrapods. Some of 
these fish are much more similar to tetrapods than lungfish and 
coelecanths. Palaeontologists have also found some strange amphibian 
animals that are pretty similar to these fish, which are likely to be the 
most primitive land-living vertebrates.

By studying these fossils, we can understand much more about how the 
animals that left them lived, and this sheds light on how the first land 
living vertebrates evolved. This is very important to zoologists, as this 
invasion of lands produced many of the most obvious animals we see all 
around us.

People studying dinosaurs have learnt a great deal about how dinosaurs 
lived, and about the conditions of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous 
eras when dinosaurs walked the earth, and have also learnt about how birds 
evolved. Its an amazing fact that birds are basically dinosaurs that have 
survived to the present day - although i'd admit they are a pretty 
specialised group of dinosaurs, with many features of their bodies and 
biology modified for their amazingly specialised way of life - flying!

Hope this explains why fossils are important to zoologists. I'm sure you 
can read more about this in both school biology text books, and in basic 
palaeontology (also spelled paleontology, without the second a) text books.

Yours,
James Cotton