You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
There are few stories more remarkable than the evolution of life on earth. This Very Short Introduction presents a succinct guide to the key episodes in that story - from the very origins of life four million years ago to the extraordinary diversity of species around the globe today. Beginning with an explanation of the controversies surrounding the birth of life itself, each following chapter tells of a major breakthrough that made new forms of life possible: including sex and multicellularity, hard skeletons, and the move to land. Along the way, we witness the greatest mass extinction, the first forests, the rise of modern ecosystems, and, most recently, conscious humans. Introducing ideas...
Describes the largest dinosaurs, providing color illustrations, pronunciation guide and details on their physical characteristics, geographic areas, time periods and diets.
This volume details all British sites that have yielded fossil reptiles, describing in detail the fifty most important localities and providing an extensive bibliography of everything published on British Fossil reptiles since 1676.
It is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact 65 million years ago that killed half of all species then living, but far less well-known is a much greater catastrophe that took place 251 million years ago: at least 90 per cent of life was destroyed, including sabre-toothed reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, as well as vast numbers of fish and other species in the sea. This book documents not only what happened during this gigantic mass extinction, but also the recent reviving of the idea of catastrophism. Was the end-Permian event caused by the impact of a huge meteorite or comet, or by prolonged volcanic eruption in Siberia? The evidence has been accum...
This book presents a comprehensive overview of the science of the history of life. Paleobiologists bring many analytical tools to bear in interpreting the fossil record and the book introduces the latest techniques, from multivariate investigations of biogeography and biostratigraphy to engineering analysis of dinosaur skulls, and from homeobox genes to cladistics. All the well-known fossil groups are included, including microfossils and invertebrates, but an important feature is the thorough coverage of plants, vertebrates and trace fossils together with discussion of the origins of both life and the metazoans. All key related subjects are introduced, such as systematics, ecology, evolution...
Palaeontology, a fundamental topic in geology and evolutionary biology, has undergone exciting and rapid change in recent years. Contemporary debates on mass extinctions and the origin of life have had profound implications for our understanding of how life evolved. Basic Palaeontology is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to palaeontology. With in-depth analysis of basic principles and all the main fossil groups, this fully illustrated text presents new and exciting research on the origin and history of life. The text focuses on traditional topics such as marine invertebrate palaeontology and biostratigraphy, but also provides unique and unparalleled taxonomic coverage from microfo...
A new edition of the illustrated compendium that is “a gift to serious dinosaur enthusiasts” (Science). What do we know about dinosaurs, and how do we know it? How did they grow, move, eat, and reproduce? Were they warm-blooded or cold-blooded? How intelligent were they? How are the various groups of dinosaurs related to each other, and to other kinds of living and extinct vertebrates? What can the study of dinosaurs tell us about the process of evolution? And why did typical dinosaurs become extinct? These questions and more are addressed in this new, expanded edition of The Complete Dinosaur. Written by leading experts on the “fearfully great” reptiles, the book covers what we have...
Spanning evolutionary science from its inception to its latest findings, from discoveries and data to philosophy and history, this book is the most complete, authoritative, and inviting one-volume introduction to evolutionary biology available. Clear, informative, and comprehensive in scope, Evolution opens with a series of major essays dealing with the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology, with major empirical and theoretical questions in the science, from speciation to adaptation, from paleontology to evolutionary development (evo devo), and concluding with essays on the social and political significance of evolutionary biology today. A second encyclopedic section travels the spe...
None