Learning from the Multiple Fossil Records Bridges Research and Teaching Practices and Promotes Systems Thinking in Paleontology Education

Large-scale efforts to catalog the fossil record and digitize museum collections have driven the recognition of two distinct forms of fossil records: the physical record, consisting of specimens, and the abstracted record, consisting of data derived from those specimens. This framework provides a conceptual basis for distinguishing between specimen-based and data-driven resources for teaching and learning paleontology in formal educational settings. In this position paper, we show that state-of-the-art paleontological research increasingly conceptualizes the so-called abstracted fossil record not merely as digital data or archives (e.g., databases, digital models, and imagery), but primarily as complex representations of the spatiotemporally resolved and high-dimensional geohistorical data. Building on this perspective, we highlight a major gap between modern paleontological research and teaching practices in higher education, where paleontology courses often rely on the specimen-data dichotomy and ignore that abstracted representations of the fossil record, such as network models, encode assumptions about its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics that shape the patterns inferred from fossil data. Because a physical fossil record can give rise to multiple abstracted representations, each capturing different aspects of the underlying data, we introduce the concept of multiple fossil records within a complex network framework. We argue that leveraging network-based tools can bridge paleontological research and teaching practices while fostering systems thinking in the paleontology classroom, consistent with the UNESCO Education 2030 Framework for Action.