Historical Geology
by Reed Wicander, James S. Monroe · Wicander
An undergraduate textbook tracing Earth's physical and biological past through plate tectonics, stratigraphy, and the fossil record. It teaches you to read rock sequences as evidence and to place events on the geologic time scale.
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More resources on Historical Geology
USGS Paleontology
The U.S. Geological Survey's hub for its paleontology work, collecting research projects, publications, and fossil datasets. Use it to see how fossils are used as evidence for dating rock units and reconstructing past climates and environments.
Planet Earth...and You!
Earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain building, ice ages, landslides, floods, life evolution, plate motions—all of these phenomena have interacted over the vast expanses of deep time to sculpt the dynamic planet that we live on today. Planet Earth presents an overview of several aspects of our home, from a geological perspective. We begin with earthquakes—what they are, what causes them, what effects they have, and what we can do about them. We will emphasize that plate tectonics—the grand unifying theory of geology—explains how the map of our planet's surface has changed radically over geologic time, and why present-day geologic activity—including a variety of devastating natural disasters such as earthquakes—occur where they do. We consider volcanoes, types of eruptions, and typical rocks found there. Finally, we will delve into the processes that produce the energy and mineral resources that modern society depends on, to help understand the context of the environment and sustainability challenges that we will face in the future.
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds
Sixteen reconstructed ecosystems, each built from a real fossil site, presented backward in time from Pleistocene Alaska to Ediacaran Australia. Every scene is assembled from published evidence and used to show how climate, geography, and extinction reshape life. The best-written treatment of ancient ecosystems and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, which is the part of the topic note that popular dinosaur books skip entirely.
Digital Encyclopedia of Ancient Life
Open-access paleontology textbook from the Paleontological Research Institution covering fossilization, geologic time, dating methods, systematics, paleoecology, and the major fossil groups, with photographs, downloadable 3D specimen models, and regional field guides for identifying fossils.
stratigraphy.org
Stratigraphy.org is the official site of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, providing authoritative global stratigraphic standards and time scale charts used to organize Earth's history. It offers access to the Geological Time Scale, stratigraphic chart definitions, GSSPs, and links to publications and educational resources for historical geology.
The Map That Changed the World
Narrative history of William Smith, the canal surveyor who produced the first geological map of England in 1815. Explains how stratigraphy and fossil succession were established, and the personal cost Smith paid for the work.