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It's True! We came from slime (7)
Bugs that make rocks. Fish with teeth on the outside. Beasts with blades like steak knives on their backs. Scorpion look-alikes two metres long. Can they be real? This book has everything you ever wanted to know about fossils and evolution. Ages 8-12.
Unearthing the Underworld
A geological saga that digs deep, revealing how even the most ordinary rocks can be stepping stones to the hidden history of our planet. Unearthing the Underworld reveals the hidden world of rocks—the keepers of secrets of past environments, changing climates, and the pulse of life over billions of years. Even the most seemingly ordinary stone can tell us much about the history of this planet, opening vistas of ancient worlds of ice, raging floods, strange unbreathable atmospheres, and prehistoric worlds teeming with life. Remarkably, many types of rocks owe their existence to living organisms—from the remains of bodies of dead animals to rocks formed from rotting ancient forests, or even created by the activity of fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Anything but dull and uninteresting, rocks are intriguing portals that illuminate the secret underworld upon which we live.
The Star-Crossed Stone
Throughout the four hundred thousand years that humanity has been collecting fossils, sea urchin fossils, or echinoids, have continually been among the most prized, from the Paleolithic era, when they decorated flint axes, to today, when paleobiologists study them for clues to the earth’s history. In The Star-Crossed Stone, Kenneth J. McNamara, an expert on fossil echinoids, takes readers on an incredible fossil hunt, with stops in history, paleontology, folklore, mythology, art, religion, and much more. Beginning with prehistoric times, when urchin fossils were used as jewelry, McNamara reveals how the fossil crept into the religious and cultural lives of societies around the world—the ...
Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones
For at least half a million years, people have been doing some very strange things with fossils. Long before a few seventeenth-century minds started to decipher their true, organic nature, fossils had been eaten, dropped in goblets of wine, buried with the dead, and adorned bodies. What triggered such curious behavior was the belief that some fossils could cure illness, protect against being poisoned, ease the passage into the afterlife, ward off evil spirits, and even kill those who were just plain annoying. But above all, to our early prehistoric ancestors, fossils were the very stuff of artistic inspiration. Drawing on archaeology, mythology, and folklore, Ken McNamara takes us on a journey through prehistory with these curious stones, and he explores humankind’s unending quest for the meaning of fossils.
It's True! We Came from Slime
An introduction to palentology describes a variety of prehistoric animals and reptiles.
Stromatolites
David Attenborough began his extraordinary tv series, The Living Planet at Shark Bay in Australia’s northwest, because crossing the low dunes and descending to the beach is like slipping billions of years back in time. Where the waves gently break on the shore are stromatolites, rising like rows of concrete cauliflowers from the ocean. While they may look like inanimate rocks, examining a piece from the surface under a powerful microscope shows that it is teeming with life. Stromatolites are complex domes or columns of sediment formed by microbiological communities. These ‘living rocks’, as they are sometimes called, teem with the very oldest life forms on earth, having remained virtually unchanged during the comings and goings of all the animals and plants that have ever lived. This book is a clear and accessible, illustrated account of the structure and formation of these remarkable constructions.
Shapes of Time
How did evolution produce specific characteristics, such as the feet of amphibians, or the eye and brain that allow us to read these words? Museum curator Kenneth McNamara delves into the fascinating field of heterochrony to show the errant results when a normal pattern of embryological development is gently nudged off-course. 60 illustrations.
Pinnacles
On the coast north of Perth is one of the most unusual landscapes in all Australia — the Pinnacles Desert. Out of the bare, yellow, shifting sands rise thousands of huge, limestone pillars. Massive and immobile in such a stark landscape, these grotesquely sculptured stone columns look as if they have stood for ages. What exactly are pinnacles? How did they form? What natural processes were able to create such spectacular structures: And what can they tell us about the evolution of the coastal scenery of this part of Australia? This beautifully illustrated book addresses all these questions in clear, concise language.
Evolutionary Trends
This book examines evolutionary trends within a wide range of fossil invertebrate and vertebrate animals and fossil plants. An international group of research leaders in palaeontology contribute broad review chapters on the patterns and processes of directionality in evolution, as evidenced from the fossil record. The different hierarchies of trends are considered at taxonomic levels from the interspecific to broader groups, and the rate and interrelationships of processes are documented. The key evolutionary questions of how particular characters are selected for and how far the morphology of particular lifeforms is linked to their function are addressed. The environmental dimension of evolutionary change is developed and in particular the evidence for evolutionary trends following environmental gradients is evaluated.
Human Evolution Through Developmental Change
This book reflects two major strands of research in the study of human heterochrony, the change in the timing and rate of development of individuals.
