First Paragraph
This volume has its origins in a joint research program between the Natural History Museum, London and University College, London on Global Change and the Biosphere. The authors are mainly paleontologists, and include contributors to the program as well as invited specialists. They were all given the charge of documenting patterns in fossil data in relation to their knowledge and understanding of environmental change at scales ranging from global to regional/local. The result is a fascinating mixture of observations and interpretation about the remarkable changes that have occurred in both the environment and biota of the Earth over the last 145 million years (my).