The Permian was one of the feathers in Roderick Murchison's stratigraphic ‘cap’. It was in 1841 that he, with a little help from his friends and collaborators, applied the name ‘Permian System’ to the ‘vast series of beds of marls, schists, limestones, sandstones and conglomerates’ that overlie Carboniferous strata across a vast area of European Russia west of the Urals from the Caspian in the south to the White Sea in the north. He named Permian after the regional capital Perm.

As Murchison recognised, much of his new system was comprised of non-marine strata that are not particularly fossiliferous. And, since modern stratigraphers have generally agreed that the Standard Global Chronostratigraphic Scale (SGCS) has to be based on marine strata and fossils, there is a major problem in correlating much of the Permian rock record that is terrestrial.

The problem is not new, especially as so many of the best-known Permian sequences of western Europe are non-marine. According to Lucas, Cassinis & Schneider in their introduction, even historic stratigraphic terms such as Rotliegend, Zechstein, Autunian, Saxonian and Thuringian are inadequately defined.

But as the 14 essays in this volume show, there has been considerable effort in recent decades to see how the Permian non-marine sequences can be integrated into the formal definition of the Permian SGCS. The biostratigraphic potential of fossil groups such as the freshwater conchostracans, ostracodes, insects and bivalves has improved significantly. Additionally, there has been a lot of interest in the vertebrate palaeontology with attempts to integrate body and trace fossils. But there is still a long way to go in the correlation of non-marine biostratigraphy with the expanding magnetostratigraphic and radio-isotope data. Nevertheless, this volume is an extremely useful update on non-marine Permian biostratigraphy and biochronology, and will be of interest to a wide range of interest groups from a broad spectrum of palaeontologists to stratigraphers.