Discoveries are a driving force for progress in palaeontology. Palaeontology as a discipline of scientific inquiry has gained many fresh insights into the history of life, from the discoveries of many new fossils in China in the last 20 years, and from the new ideas derived from these fossils. This special issue of Proceedings of Royal Society B entitled Recent Advances in Chinese Palaeontology...

In the broadest possible sense, molecular palaeontology might encompass any and all chemical traces left by onceliving organismsorby their life processes.Thiswould cover fields ranging from isotope geochemistry and biomineralization to molecular biology. However, in a more restricted sense, molecular palaeontology is the study of complex organic molecules made by once-living organisms. In some ...

Department of Earth and Environmental Science, Palaeontology and Geobiology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany, 2 Faculty of Biology, Munich Graduate School for Evolution, Ecology and Systematics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany, 3 Bavarian State Collections of Palaeontology and Geology, Munich, Germany, GeoBio-Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität...