Books about early life
 |
The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex
Life During an expedition in Sonora, Mexico, palaeontologist Mark McMenamin unearthed fossils of creatures dated at approximately 600 million years old. These circular fossils, which are known as Ediacarans, seemed to defy explanation. This book documents their discovery. The Ediacarans were a marine life form that existed in Precambrian times, as much as 50 million years before life on earth began to diversify rapidly. McMenamin's curiosity was fuelled by the question of whether the Ediacarans were animals or some other type of organism. How could complex forms of life appear without respect to adaptation, without extensive records of prior evolution?. This book details McMenamin's trip to Namibia, where, with a party including palaeontologist Adolf Seilacher, he investigates a cast made from a colony of fossils in the Nama desert. |
 |
The Fossils of the Burgess Shale |
 |
The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals 'The centerpiece of The Crucible of Creation is a description, authoritative and readable, of the animals themselves.' New York Times Book Review "tells a great story and manages to be informative at all levels.
Conway Morris has a collector's eye for the sort of entertaining yet
informative snippets that keep readers on their toes." |
 |
Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils One of the greatest mysteries in reconstructing the history of life on Earth has been the apparent absence of fossils dating back more than 500 million years. We have long known that fossils of sophisticated marine life-forms existed at the dawn of the Cambrian Period, but until recently scientists had found no traces of Precambrian fossils. The quest to find such traces began in earnest in the mid-1960s and culminated in one dramatic moment in 1993 when William Schopf identified fossilized micro-organisms three and a half billion years old. This find opened up a vast period of time - some 85 per cent of Earth's history - to new research and new ideas about life's beginnings. In this book, William Schopf, a pioneer of modern paleobiology, tells the story of the origins and earliest evolution of life and how that story has been unearthed. |
if you have any suggestion, comment, link to add, if you find
unavailable link, mail to boggy