Paleontology is the study of life of the past, the study of fossils.
It is the biological part of geology. It provides a basic, and a very detailed, global time scale for the past 600 million years using the evolutionary sequences of organic life. Paleoecology is the branch of paleontology dealing with the function of ancient organisms and their relationships to their environment and to each other. Ancient organisms can tell us a great deal about the environments of the past. We can use fossil orga nisms to resolve ancient climates, temperatures, latitudes, prevailing current and wind directions.