Reasons for a name

The term Paleocene was coined in 1874 by Wilhelm Philipp Schimper, a paleobotanist, to frame a series of terrestrial floras intermediate between the Cretaceous and the Eocene. It was not until around 1920 that the term came into more general use, after the beds Schimper had described had been traced into deposits carrying both terrestrial mammals and marine invertebrates.

Wilhelm Philipp Schimper (1808-1880), the director of the Strasbourg Natural History Museum, came from a family of botanists.  In Schimper’s vision, the Paleocene association was not separated by sharp boundaries from the preceding and subsequent biota. The transition was more evident when comparing the Paleocene with the Eocene flora.

J’ai groupé l’ensemble de la végétation des temps tertiaires en cinq flores distinctes, ce qui ne veut pas dire que je considère ces cinq flores comme indépendantes les unes des autres. Toutes ces flores sont reliées entre elles dans le temps, comme nos flores locales le sont dans l’espace (…) L’ensemble des végétaux ou la flore de la période qui nous occupe ici, se rattachant directement à la continuation de la flore crétacée, et plus directement encore à celle de la période Éocène, n’en a pas moins un caractère qui lui est propre et qui la distingue de prime abord.Wilhelm Schimper, 1874 (p. 680)
Buste of Wilhelm Philipp Schimper at the Natural History Museum of Strasbourg (Photo by Denis Helfer).
Buste of Wilhelm Philipp Schimper at the Natural History Museum of Strasbourg (Photo by Denis Helfer).

As explained by Christopher Pulvertaft (1999): “the term Paleocene is not one of Charles Lyell’s epochs, and the term is much younger than the names of the other four epochs in what hitherto has been called the Tertiary; indeed there are textbooks on stratigraphy published as late as in the 1930s that do not mention the Paleocene at all and divide the Tertiary into only four epochs. Furthermore the term Paleocene was not put together in the same way as the terms Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene. In making up these terms the prefix eo- (from eos, Greek for dawn) was placed in front of the common suffix -cene (from kainos, Greek for new, recent) to imply the epoch which saw the dawn of modern life forms, and so on. “Paleocene” on the other hand is an abbreviation of palaeo- plus Eocene. Pal + Eocene implies “the old part of the Eocene” which is what Schimper intended”.

Learn more

Pulvertaft T.C.R. (1999). “Paleocene” or “Palaeocene”. Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark 46, 52.

Schimper W.P. (1874). Traité de Paleontologie végétale ou la flore du monde primitif dans ses rapports avec les formations géologiques et la flore du monde actuel. Tome troisieme. 896 pp. Bailliére J.B. et Fils ed., Paris.

Links

To learn about Wilhelm Schimper’s background, read about the work of George Wilhelm Schimper in Abyssinia, with a biography.