多学科交叉新秀:古生物信息学的兴起与发展

A new domain of multidisciplinary research:The rise and development of Paleo-bioinformatic

古生物学的研究对象为“死”的化石,如何将死的化石以“活”的形式展示给大众历来是古生物学研究的难点与热点之一。古生物信息学是西北大学地质学系刘建妮教授首次提出的全新概念,它是古生物学、信息学、数学、生物学及艺术等多学科的交叉融合所产生的新学科,主要致力于挖掘古生物之间或者古生物与现生生物之间的谱系演化关系,对古生物进行三维检索、三维重建及艺术展示等研究方向。该文介绍了该团队近年来在古生物化石资源电子化平台、古生物谱系分析和古生物化石图像检索及三维重建的研究成果,展示了古生物信息可视化技术及其相关科普产品研发。最后展望了古生物信息学的发展前景,指出它必将是21世纪自然科学的核心领域之一。

The research object of paleontology is"dead"fossils.How to display dead fossils to the public in the"living"form has always been one of the difficulties and hotspots in paleontology research.Paleo-bioinformaticsis a new concept which was proposed by Prof.Jianni Liu in 2012.Paleo-bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary cross-fertilization of paleontology,informatics,mathematics,biology and art,which not only strives to scientifically and aesthetically display the evolutionary relationship between fossils or between fossils and living organisms,but also helps to restore and 3D reconstruct of fossils based on their characters.This paper introduces the development history and construction results of the electronic platform for paleontological fossil resources,sorts out the research content of palaeontological pedigree analysis methods,expounds the research results of paleontological fossil images retrieval and three-dimensional reconstruction,and demonstrates the research and development of paleontological information visualization technology and related popular science products.Finally,the development prospect of Paleo-bioinformatics is forecasted,which will be one of the core fields of natural science in the 21st century.