It is no longer acceptable to train macro-evolutionary biologists without a fundamental grounding in the basic principles of micro-evolutionary processes and techniques. Now-ubiquitous molecular evidence is applied to discussions of evolutionary biology on all scales and some level of understanding is imperitive to fully comprehend the pertinent literature for most classical paleontological topics. However there are no texts available, which provide this background and combine these lines of research in an accessible way and with the goal of providing this education. Paleontologists now have the opportunity to sequence mitochondrial genes and ribosomal genes from numerous taxa, but these data often lack meaningful context when returned from a lab. With this volume we integrate the language of molecular biology and the language of paleontology in a manner that is accessible to both field-based and molecular laboratory-based paleontologists. Where real paleontological problems provide a story and template through which to examine Molecular Paleobiology, the technique boxes provide the nuts and bolts of the procedures and the context within which to interpret and integrate these data into other lines of evidence.