BOOK REVIEW Philosophy among the fossils Derek Turner: Paleontology: A philosophical introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 208pp, $28.99, £17.99 PB David Sepkoski Published online: 30 November 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Throughout much of its history as a professional discipline, paleontology has been dogged by the perception that it is a merely descriptive science—a ‘‘handmaiden’’ to geology or biology—whose practitioners, concerned as they are with digging up and describing fossils, have little of interest or value to contribute to evolutionary theory. However, over the past 40 years, paleontologists have cast off some of this traditional stigma and worked actively to develop a methodology for interpreting the fossil record that combines quantitative data analysis, modeling and simulation, and active theoretical interest in evolutionary patterns and processes. This movement, termed ‘‘paleobiology’’ by its proponents, has gained attention with innovative new perspectives on speciation, extinction dynamics, the evolution of diversity, and macro-evolutionary trends and has produced attention-grabbing theories such as punctuated equilibrium, species selection, and the hierarchical theory of macro- evolution. While many of these ideas remain a source of controversy and debate among evolutionary biologists, one fact is clear: paleontologists do have something interesting to contribute to the development of evolutionary theory, and their work is of real interest to philosophers of biology. One of the major strengths of Derek Turner’s excellent new introduction to the philosophy of paleontology, then, is that it lays out many of the central philosophical questions in paleontology in a clear and thoughtful manner that both readers (and students) unfamiliar with the subject and scholars with expertise in paleontology or philosophy of biology will find valuable and stimulating. This is Turner’s second book on paleontology, but unlike his first—a fine monograph that contextualized paleontology within debates about philosophical realism (2007)— Paleontology: A Philosophical Introduction offers an expansive survey of general questions raised by evolutionary paleontology, as well as a compelling defense of D. Sepkoski (&) History Department, University of North Carolina Wilmington, 601 S. College Road, Wilmington, NC 28405, USA e-mail: sepkoskid@uncw.edu 123 Metascience (2012) 21:363–366 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9616-3