A Methodological Renaissance to Advance Perennial Issues in Vertebrate Paleohistology
Résumé
For over a century, microstructural studies of extant and fossilized skeletal tissues at various levels of integration have greatly improved our understanding of the growth, physiology, function, biomechanics, and evolution of hard tissues in most vertebrate taxa. The concurrent work of research teams all over the world has produced solid and consistent results that form the basis of our current knowledge of bone histology and paleohistology. In the context of paleoecology, technological developments also allow great advances in biomechanics. There are several levels at which bone can be studied from a biomechanical point of view. Likewise, paleophysiology, and particularly the estimation of metabolic rates, has seen significant developments in the last decade through the boom of phylogenetic comparative methods. An approach, falling into the broad field of “paleogenomics”, uses bone, and most specifically bone cell volumes, as proxies for the evolution of the vertebrate genome size.