In an academic world shaped, not merely measured, by impact factors and h indices, it is not at all clear what role there is for edited book series that are largely invisible to citation databases. This may not be a bad outcome since edited academic volumes are invariably a mixed bag, including reviews of work already published in peer-reviewed journals, and half-baked nonsense that could not get published elsewhere; few are prepared to risk burying their gems of insight in such venues. To be sure, in Quantifying the Evolution of Early Life, there is plenty rehashing of work published elsewhere but, surprisingly, this is its strength. Rather than reviewing theoretical advances published elsewhere, it draws together and fleshes out the observational and analytical methodologies that have been the foundation of recent advances in the understanding of (mainly) Ediacaran and Cambrian palaeobiology. Ediacaran organisms, for instance, are so poorly understood from their fossil remains that the eeking out of the most banal aspects of their palaeobiology can have far reaching consequences. Naturally, those insights are hard won, requiring the development of novel techniques, the descriptions of which most journals have no room or little appetite to publish. Yet it is precisely the information that researchers require in detail in order to reproduce results and apply the methods to other palaeobiological conundra.
Chapters that are likely to become particularly well thumbed include Sebastian Willman and Phoebe Cohen's description of the preparation techniques for applying transmission electron microscopy to organic walled microfossils. I can testify personally to the time and, therefore, cost of adapting preparation protocols, developed for studying living organisms, to the analysis of fossils. But here, Willman and Cohen provide an excellent primer that includes discussion of the common artefacts introduced by preparation techniques that can and have been misinterpreted as reflecting biological structure. Schiffbauer and Xiao's chapter describes how TEM slices can be extracted directly using a Focused Ion Beam Electron Microscopy (FIB-EM), which they also apply in a manner akin to Sollas’ serial grinding method, but at the nanometre scale, in the characterization of Mesoproterozoic acritarchs. Schopf and Kudryatsev introduce confocal laser scanning microscopy and Raman spectroscopic imaging, as methods to characterize the morphology and chemical composition of permineralized microfossils. Orr and Kearns provide a particularly useful primer on the principles and limitations of X-ray microanalysis of Burgess Shale-style fossil preservation, that is relevant generally to understanding the organic remains and phases of mineral replication in fossilization.
Some of the methods are so well established and widely applied that they have been adequately described elsewhere (e.g. stable isotopes, biomarkers) and the three chapters on multivariate statistical methods might have been better distilled into one. A number of pertinent methods are not covered: x-ray microtomography, clumped isotopes, and finite elements analysis. The greatest omission has to be the multifarious methods of molecular biology that are now so commonly employed in Cambrian and Ediacaran palaeobiology: molecular phylogenetics, divergence time estimation, and comparative developmental genetics. Evidently, there is scope and there will be demand for further volumes.
You won't find this book on my bookshelf and you shouldn't expect to find a copy on your library shelf. In both instances it is likely to be on long-term loan to canny graduate students looking to apply these methods to new problems. In place of yet another dispensable conference proceedings, Marc Laflamme and his colleagues have cleverly identified a gap in the market that I hope they will fill with further volumes in this series.
