Rocky Mountain paleontology: Digging the past with an eye to the future

Science is a verb. Its approach, the scientific method, brings us closer to understanding nature through discovery and hypothesis testing. In most deep-time and deep-Earth science, complete understanding is unachievable. Fortunately, we move closer to it with each new generation of scientists, creating frameworks of knowledge that evolve with ever-more-refined observations, interpretations, and hypotheses. The field of paleontology epitomizes this phenomenon, and its evolution is intimately tied to fossils and strata of the Rocky Mountains. Using examples from the American West, the ensuing article highlights how a field anchored in the archaic has a very bright future—because paleontology has grown to help our community answer Earth-science questions spanning tectonics, climate, the evolutionary history of life, and beyond.