 Hello everybody, my name is Dave Harper and I'm a professor of paleontology in Durham University. I'm a paleontologist and I study the history of life. We have a record of about four billion years on this planet when life has been evolving from one species deep in the Precambrian to the 20 million species plus that inhabit the planet today. There's also been an increase in complexity of life from a single bacterium deep in the Precambrian to the great complexity that we see on the planet today, including ourselves. Now the key piece of information for all this is in fact the fossil record and fossils themselves. So it's absolutely essential that we go out in the field into mountain belts or wherever and collect fossil information. We can understand how and where animals and plants evolved and adapted to climate and their environments in deep time. Now because fossils are evolving through time and different types of fossils occupy different time zones, we can actually use fossils to correlate strata. And because like today there are provinces in the geological past, we can use the provincial signatures of fossils, animals and plants to reconstruct where the continents actually were in deep time. And using correlation and using biogeography we can start to reconstruct mountain belts where various parts came from such as zones within the Himalayas. I find paleontology absolutely fascinating because we're dealing with the evolution of life on this planet. And so I'd ask you to look out for fossils on your course and enjoy your course. Thank you very much.