Skull and Bones
Most months, the bulletin cover art reconstructs animals that have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years, depicting trilobites, weird echinoderms, shelled cephalopods, and other assorted ancient creatures in speculative colors and settings. However, this month’s modern topic has inspired the converse: whereas most represent extinct animals in life, this cover features an extant animal in death.
These decaying caribou bones, surrounded by lichens and hardy scrub on the Alaskan tundra, may or may not make it into the fossil record. Yet this uncertain fate does not mean they are divorced from the paleontological discipline. By studying the physical and chemical traits of these bones and comparing them to data from living animals, researchers can model where the deceased lived, what it ate, and how it interacted with other animals and its environment.
This model can then be applied to older remains (subfossil, permafrosted, or truly fossilized) to understand the history of the species at millennial timescales, including its response to changing conditions over time. In turn, this deep time perspective can be used to predict how the creature will respond to future changes and even human intervention. Thus, by centering modern biology within the broader context of paleontology, a richer, more meaningful natural history is revealed.