Paleontology and stratigraphy are traditional and fundamental disciplines in the Earth sciences. They take rocks, strata and fossils as their research objects and aim to understand the evolution of life and conduct geological surveys. With the advent of the information age, the concepts, methods and technologies related to big data have been integrated into and profoundly transformed the development of paleontology and stratigraphy, the data of which are large in volume, diverse in type, highly specialized, and have high application thresholds. In recent years, big data has been widely applied in paleontology and stratigraphy research. Research based on data analysis has also gradually been carried out, and new insights have been achieved in areas such as paleobiological diversity, morphological disparity and morphospace, spatio-temporal distribution, network relationships, high-resolution stratigraphic correlation, paleogeographic reconstruction, paleoecosystem evolution, machine vision, and three-dimensional morphology and function reconstruction etc. These studies are promoting quantitative and even data-driven paleontology and stratigraphy research.