This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence . HUMANS: the story of Homo sapiens, is it for more than a quarter of 1 million years of failure, and at the first 98% of our existence, the tale of Homo sapiens, as one of heart-breaking tragedy, had any of the participants survived to tell the tale. Millions of years later, the gravitational shock wave of the supernova explosion passed through a cloud of gas, dust, and ice.

Some of these creatures are as large as twelve centimeters across, so hardly microscopic, but they are so strange in form to our modern eyes that their relationship with algae, fungi, or other organisms is obscure. Continents have merged and broken up; massive volcanic eruptions have repeatedly reset the clock of evolution; temperatures, atmospheric gases, and sea levels have undergone big swings; and new ways of life have evolved. As cells evolved into more complex lifeforms, the earliest known signs of multicellular life forms are around 2,100 million years ago. The complexities of life, whether it be the carboniferous era "forests" of old, the Lystrosaurus, which for millions of years roamed the Earth as the dominant species on the planet, the evolution of birds from reptilians, and the interesting menagerie of life in the ocean, are all presented well. Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then?Fast schon tröstlich, dass bei allen negativen Beiträgen unserer Spezies die befürchtete sixth extinction danach nicht allein auf menschliches Fehlbetragen zurückgeht, sondern eben auch in der Natur der Dinge liegt, dem Wechsel von Warm und Kaltzeiten. Now, sixty years later, this author's revelation is about the pale blue dots flash of existence in the cosmos, how dna evolved and how it will disappear.

Abundante en datos curiosos, con muy buen nivel científico (a veces demasiado, pero nunca hasta aburrir), fácil de leer, escrito con elegancia y gracia, pero lo mejor es el tema: el más grandioso y fascinante relato inventado - ¿o descubierto? It is unfortunate that Dr Gee did not clearly state somewhere in the text of his book nor in this last chapter, as he does in his Endnotes, that “I am telling this tale more as a story than as a scientific exercise, some of the things I’ll say have more evidential support than others. On the downside I did have to spend time looking up illustrations of at least some of the creatures - not always possible as my laptop was not always at hand.Solar energy is used to split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen, releasing more energy to drive further chemical reactions.

Many people would argue that this single pole which would become the gut was the first brain that was formed. The number of bacterial cells in (and on) a human body is very much greater than the number of human cells in that same body.At times I have felt unable to fathom how insignificant our troubles and tribulations are in the grand scheme of things. Particular highlights are his discussion of the incredibly different anatomy of plants/"trees" in the Carboniferous forests (they were hollow!

There are bacteria that can survive the vacuum of space, violent extremes of temperature or pressure, and entombment inside grains of salt—and do so for millions of years. His previous books include The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution ; Across The Bridge: Understanding the Origin of the Vertebrates ; Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution ; Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome ; The Science of Middle-Earth , and (with Luis V. Birds are relatives of the dinosaurs and when we want to see dinosaurs nowadays, we can see them in birds. Okay, I could look it up online, as I did with several examples, but it would have been good to have had them there and then.Some of the names of long extinct creatures were tongue twisters but how amazing to have a freeze frame time chart of how life has evolved looking at time from an evolutionary perspective rather than our own time reference - life learning how to adapt and grow in the challenges of existing in a volatile (though sometimes balmy) but always changing planet. The way the book is formatted you move forward through time with the Earth as it starts out in the earliest and then move forward. If a bacterium doesn’t have a resistance gene for a particular antibiotic, it can pick it up from the genetic free-for-all of other species with which it shares its environment. As a mouth developed, teeth became an effective way of grinding down food so that it could be digested easily in the stomach.