Geobiology and the fossil record: eukaryotes, microbes, and their interactions

This new awareness which geobiology represents has begun to produce a whole host of approaches that causes researchers in the laboratory of the molecular or microbiologist to interact with those from the laboratory of the geochemist as they are led on a field trip by the palaeontologist exploring some fundamental issue in the history of life. Such interactions are not only important for considerations of life on Earth, but provide a framework for the search for life that may have once existed on other planetary bodies, such as Mars. Data from deep time and hence the fossil record plays a central role in such research, and thus geobiology opens up vast new research opportunities for palaeontology.