CULVER, S. J. & RAWSON, P. F. (eds) 2000. Biotic Response to Global Change. The Last 145 Million Years. xiii+501 pp. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Price £60.00, US $95.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 521 66304 0.

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At a time when positions are disappearing and research dollars are drying up, geologists and palaeontologists around the world have begun to realize that there is a market for their skills and expertise under the rubric of ‘global climatic change’. Oil companies and universities no longer hire many palaeontologists, or fund their studies under conventional research programs, but some have been quick to realize that the fossil record provides a unique perspective on the past history of global climatic change, and that this bandwagon may help keep the profession alive. Several major NSF-sponsored programs on global change are now planned or in existence. In 1994, the Palaeontology Department of the Natural History Museum of London and the Department of Geological Sciences at University College London sponsored a joint research programme, ‘Global Change and the Biosphere’. The organizers and editors were foraminifer specialist Steve Culver (then at the Natural History Museum, but now back home in the US at East Carolina University) and ammonite palaeontologist Peter Rawson (of University College London). They realized that the best opportunity for palaeontology to shed light on global climate change is the time interval of the last 145 million years, or of the Cretaceous (with its ‘greenhouse’ climate) and Cenozoic (when the ‘greenhouse’ developed …