Treatise On Invertebrate Paleontology - Evolution of The Project

Evolution of The Project

Raymond C. Moore, the project's founder and first editor, originally envisioned this Treatise in invertebrate paleontology as comprising just three large volumes, and totaling only three thousand pages.

The project began with work on a few, mostly slim volumes in which a single senior specialist in a distinct field of invertebrate paleozoology would summarize one particular group. As a result, each publication became a comprehensive compilation of everything known at that time for each group. Examples of this stage of the project are Part G. Bryozoa, by Ray S. Bassler (the first volume, published in 1953), and Part P. Arthropoda Part 2, the Chelicerata by Alexander Petrunkevitch (1955/1956).

Around 1959 or 1960, as more and larger invertebrate groups were being addressed, the incompleteness of the then-current state of affairs became apparent. So several senior editors of the Treatise started major research programs to fill in the evident gaps. Consequently, the succeeding volumes, while still maintaining the original format, began to change from being a set of single-authored compilations into being major research projects in their own right. Newer volumes had a committee and a chief editor for each volume, with yet other authors and researchers assigned particular sections. Museum collections that had not been previously described were studied; and sometimes new major taxonomic families—and even orders—had to be described. More attention was given to transitional fossils and evolutionary radiation -- eventually producing a much-more complete encyclopedia of invertebrate paleontology.

But even in the second set of volumes, the various taxa were still described and organized in a classical Linnaean sense. The more-recent volumes began to introduce phylogenetic and cladistic ideas, along with new developments and discoveries in fields such as biogeography, molecular phylogeny, paleobiology, and organic chemistry, so that the current edition of Brachiopoda (1997 to 2002) is classified according to a cladistic arrangement, with three subphyla and a large number of classes replacing the original two classes of Articulata and Inarticulata.

All these discoveries led to revisions and additional volumes. Even those taxa already covered were expanded: Books such as those regarding the Cnidaria (vol. F), the Brachiopoda (vol. H) and the Trilobita (vol. O) each went from one modest publication to three large volumes. And yet another volume regarding the brachiopods (number five) was published in 2006.

Until 2007, the editor of the Treatise was Roger L. Kaesler at The Paleontological Institute at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.