Time and Life in the Silurian. A multidisciplinary approach. Subcommission on Silurian Stratigraphy Field Meeting 2009, (Sardinia, June 4-11, 2009), Proceedings

After about two years of hard work spent in planning and organizing the Conference “Time andlife in the Silurian: a multidisciplinary approach”, Field Meeting of the Subcommission on Silurian Stratigraphy, recently held in Sardinia in June 4-11, 2009, our effort has finally come to an end. The editing of the Conference Proceedings’ volume is now completed, as promised, within one-year by the end of the meeting. It has been a long but quite rewarding experience. The diverse papers here included are only apart of the multi-faceted contributions presented at the Conference sessions in Villasimius (Cagliari). Nevertheless, as also underlined by our Chairman, they reflect the multidisciplinary approach we strongly insisted on as a main topic when we proposed this meeting. We are firmly convinced that only by data integration and true comparison of results a real knowledge might effectively arise.This volume also offers a unique opportunity to expose our “special Silurian world” to non-Silurian or, more in general, to non-Palaeozoic people, and synchronize methods and approaches with those employed by specialists working in other time-slices. This has been possible thanks to the courtesyof the Società Paleontologica Italiana. Former President Ruggero Matteucci started with us this adventure accepting to reserve a volume of the Bollettino for our proceedings, present President Andrea Tintori gave us ample spaces to decide and allowed the download of pdf files at the Conference site. The Editorof the journal, Enrico Serpagli, kindly supervised our editorial efforts (but he is a Silurian-man, so it was not too hard to convince him). Furthermore, it is an occasion to make the Bollettino better known outside Italy, as most of the Silurian workers come from abroad. As usual tradition in a final phase of a project, it is also time of acknowledgements. First of all, this work has been made possible thanks to the precious support of reviewers who have made the real editorial work on the papers, with their accurate revisions, motivating criticism and addressed suggestions. We acknowledge their excellent contributions by naming them here: Bradley D. Cramer, Jiri Fryda, Lennart Jeppsson, Michael M. Joachimski, Markes E. Johnson, Jiri Kriz, Oliver Lehnert, David Loydell, Peep Männik, Michael J. Melchin, Ken T. Ratcliffe, Jia-Yu Rong, Mena Schemm-Gregory, Hans Peter Schönlaub, John A. Talent, Vojtech Turek and two anonymous reviewers. A great thank to single authors who have accepted our invitation in publishing in the BSPI and have strictly respected all editorial requests. Special thanks are also due to our respective families, who have tolerated us and our numerous changing moods of this last period. Finally, a message for the readers of the Bollettino della Società Paleontologica Italiana. They might find a slightly different target in this volume from the usual papers generally included in the journal. This is in the light of the new style of the Bollettino, hoping to find in a not too far future more and more multidisciplinary contributions reflecting the diverse souls of the palaeontological debate developing now in the world.