Description

Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human--big breakthroughs that made whole new ways of life possible--including cell division and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to the air. He describes the mass extinctions, especially the Permian, which obliterated 90% of life, and he sheds light on the origins of human beings, and of the many hominids that went before us. He ends by pointing out that studying the past helps us to predict the future: what happens if the atmosphere warms by 5 degrees? What happens if we destroy much of the biodiversity on Earth? These things have happened before, Benton notes. We need only look to the distant past to know the future of life on Earth.

About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

Features

• Covers life on land, and in the sea and air, and looks at animals and plants from algae and insects to dinosaurs and mammals
• Includes the latest perspectives on human evolution
• Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series--over two million copies sold worldwide
• Each chapter describes a major step in the history of life--the breakthroughs that made new forms of life possible
• Explores the origins of sex, the first multicellular creatures, the evolution of hard skeletons, the movement of animals to land, and the birth of the first forests
• Presents a completely up-to-date picture of the earliest origins of life, exploring new concepts such as the 'RNA world' and the Last Universal Common Ancestor
• Takes an interdisciplinary view--introducing new ideas from many areas including evolutionary biology, earth history, geochemistry, palaeontology, systematics, and astrobiology

Product Details

144 pages; 25 b/w halftones; ISBN13: 978-0-19-922632-0ISBN10: 0-19-922632-6

About the Author(s)