Systematics and the Fossil Record: Documenting Evolutionary Patterns

Book Description

This new text sets out to establish the key role played by systematics in deciphering patterns of evolution from the fossil record. It begins by considering the nature of species in the fossil record and then outlines recent advances in the methodology used to establish phylogenetics relationships, stressing why fossil evidence can be crucial. The way in which species are grouped into higher taxa, and how this affects their utility in evolutionary studies is discussed. Since the fossil record abounds with sampling and preservational biases it is emphasised that observed patterns can rarely be taken at face value. It is argued that evolutionary trees, constructed from combining phylogenetic and biostratigraphic data, provide the best approach for investigating patterns of evolution through geologic time.

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Human Origins-- A Guide
The Complete Record
Awesome illustrations and coverage of the specimens
Human Origins

Human Origins : The Fossil Record
Clark Spencer Larsen
Manufacturer: Waveland Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1577660021

Book Description

An up-to-date pictorial review of the major fossil finds in the world! This updated, introductory guidebook to the fossil record of prehuman and human evolution presents detailed drawings of complete or nearly complete specimens representative of particular grades of evolution. Each drawing (usually shown at 75 percent of original size) is accompanied by appropriate information, including geographical location, approximate age, and general description. Descriptions include information on the context of the discovery and summary anatomical details. The detailed drawings in this highly regarded volume make it an excellent sourcebook for use in departments with limited fossil cast collections.

Customer Reviews:

Human Origins-- A Guide.......2003-12-19

Okay, Australopithecus afarensis. I've heard of Lucy; I know she was found at Hadar in Ethiopia, but what is her accession number? How much of her was actually recovered? Good thing I have my copy of Larsen et al. "Human Origins: The Fossil Record" on hand.

Superbly illustrated with line drawings and maps of the different fossil localities, this encyclopedic text traces human evolution from the Dawn Apes through modern Homo sapiens in the best way possible-- with the fossils. Each specimen is well drawn, most in multiple views, so that the student or amateur who can't make it to Addis Adaba to see the real thing can have a chance to compare fossil homonids from around the world. In addition, for comparative purposes, the authors have also supplied illustrations of the modern great apes. A fun and informative text either for study or just as an escape into our origins. I must emphasize, however, that the emphasis of this book is on illustrations for pictorial comparisons, not on descriptions. The text concerning each fossil, therefore, is fairly short.

The Complete Record.......2002-11-23

When you read this book you will realize why there is so much controversy about Human origins. The fossil record is so sparse, it makes you wonder how scientists have been able to deduce as much as they already have. This book was probably written as a reference for college level courses in paleoanthroplogy, but it is also a good reference for armchair amateurs such as myself. Concise, well written and superbly illustrated, the book is an invaluable resource.

Awesome illustrations and coverage of the specimens.......2001-10-11

Covers a ton of prominent homind specimens with detailed black and white illustrations (drawings not photos) that accent the morphological features of each specimen. Includes detailed descriptions of the specimens and also a nice description at the beginning of each section. As a bonus also includes a section with non-hominid primate specimens. This book is great for anthropology students needing a quick reference to numerous specimens. It also contains numerous references to the literature about each specimen so makes a great starting point for research.

Human Origins.......2000-07-08

This book is an excellent source for students and teachers of human evolution. It is the first compilation that I have seen that puts drawings of all the major fossil finds together in one place. It is very helpful as a supplementary text in an intro human origins class since most books lack adequate pictures of the major fossil players.

In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life

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Does Cladistics Throw the Evolutionary Baby Out with the Evolutionary Bathwater?
Not as clear & definitive as I would like
What we can learn from fossils
Clarifying with cladistics?
A little bit honest...At least that's a start

In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life
Henry Gee
Manufacturer: Comstock Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801487137

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For centuries, biological scientists have been using the Linnean system of classification, organizing hierarchies of life forms by their perceived similarities and differences. In the late 20th century, some scientists have taken to using an alternative system called cladistics, which bases taxonomic classifications on ecological relationships. Under the first system, all algae fall into a single large category, which is then subdivided into various genera and species; under the second, green algae are grouped with plants, chromophyte algae with waterborne fungi, and so forth to account for the environments in which they live. Under the first system, dogs and wolves and coyotes are separated; under the second, they are united, for, the thinking goes, similarities of behavior and provenance are more important than mere lines of evolutionary descent, which can only be guessed at.

The debate over cladistics has largely been confined to seminar rooms and laboratories. Henry Gee brings it to the general public in this spirited look at how the science of paleontology, that grand tour of what Gee calls Deep Time, is conducted. Replacing old family trees with "cladograms," Gee challenges long-accepted notions about the past (for example, the classification of Archaeopteryx, which walks like a duck and quacks like a duck but is accounted for as a dinosaur) and argues for a return to rigor in testing hypotheses. His book, although about difficult issues, is immediately accessible, and readers seeking to learn something about cladistics--which Gee believes is "a revolution in thought as profound as that of Darwinian evolution by natural selection"--are off to a fine start in these pages. --Gregory McNamee

Book Description

In this exciting work on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, Henry Gee, Chief Science Writer at Nature, tells the story of a recent revolution in palaeontology. For the first time, all of us can share in the wonder of a deceptively simple idea known as cladistics, the science of comparison. The cladistics revolution is transforming almost everything we know about the science of life in Deep Time -- the billions of years in which life has evolved on this planet. It provides insights and solutions to questions about ourselves ordinarily considered beyond the realm of science.

What can we truly know of the awesome dark chasm of Deep Time that separates us from the beginning of life on earth? In Search of Deep Time strips away conventional assumptions about the evolution of life to reveal a bizarre world that is truer to the facts -- and far stranger -- than many Darwinians and certainly any Creationists ever imagined. Scientists used to categorize life forms according to how similar they looked. If an animal had a wing, it was a bird; if it had a fin, it was a fish. But then, is a penguin a bird? Is a whale a mammal? While the answer to these questions is yes, it doesn't mean much scientifically. The real answers to how life evolved and how life forms are related come from cladistic analysis, from measuring the tremendous variety of genetic and anatomic variations between species and juggling them with computer technology. Because of cladistics, scientists have come to believe that hippos are more closely related to whales than pigs. We have learned that the old way of understanding nature, in which we squashed the teeming variety of life on earth into our own haphazard and arbitrary categories, must be replaced by understanding precisely how similar, and how different, each species measurably is. Rather than a hierarchical tree of life with ourselves at the apex, we now see a bush with evolutionary branches intertwining in strange and surprising ways -- mushrooms really are closer cousins to us than plants are.

Gee journeys among the scientists who are making the breakthrough discoveries about the evolution of life. He travels to a fossil dig in Kenya with Meave Leakey of the pioneering palaeoanthropology family that made the Rift Valley in East Africa famous as the origin of modern humans. There he finds a small fossilized skull, and considers whether anyone could ever know if that fossil was the remains of Gee's great-great-great-great-great-, etc., grandfather. The answer is clearly no. There are no knowable ancestors in Deep Time. Beyond the last few dozen generations, all individuals in the entire animal kingdom, indeed all individuals throughout the epochs of Deep Time in all the kingdoms of life on earth, are cousins. Whether in Eastern Africa or in his native London with palaeontology's "Gang of Four," Gee offers lively explorations of the idea that there is no knowable descent of man. Throughout, he displays the crackling wit and exceptional command of his field that readers of his articles in Nature have admired for years. He takes you to the places where science is happening and becomes the perfect guide to a scientific adventure of the mind.

In Search of Deep Time shines a light on age-old controversies about fish with fingers and dinosaurs with wings, but also reveals the scientific facts of problems we have only begun thinking about. For instance, how will we recognize life inside a rock on another planet if we should ever find it? Cladistics ultimately leads Gee to a surprisingly profound question: What if there were another hominid species to compare ourselves with? Perhaps the science of comparison, cladistics, is the only way we will ever really come to terms with who we are, because real knowledge can only be based on comparison. Gee illuminates a shift in the history of science that is happening now and is changing our understanding of what scientific knowledge is. More deeply, it is changing our understanding of who we are.

Customer Reviews:

Does Cladistics Throw the Evolutionary Baby Out with the Evolutionary Bathwater?.......2006-06-12

I agree with James McCall's review. I don't regret reading the book, though it didn't teach me much about cladistics that I didn't already know. However, I found the first several chapters tedious, repeating the same criticisms of "evolutionary story-telling" over and over. I think it would have been much more effective if Gee had given more examples of how cladistics better illuminates interesting evolutionary questions than the traditional approach.

Regardless of the limitations of story-telling in "deep time," it exists because people want to know, for example, why and how some group of fishes gave rise to tetrapods, or how some group of ancient proto-hippos (hypothetically) evolved into whales. Gee's extreme methodological purism (as I understand it) would have us ignore these interesting questions as unanswerable. It seems to me that a more constructive approach would be to have cladistic reconstructions set limits on and help decide between conflicting evolutionary stories, while acknowledging their highly provisional nature. The process may not be as rigorous as a cladistic analysis, but if enough hippopotamid fossils from around the time of divergence between whales and hippos were discovered, one or more evolutionary/geological/ecological hypotheses could be constructed to describe how it occurred. The hypotheses would have to be consistent with the geological and geographical context of the fossils, and would be subject to revision or winnowing as new fossils are found. This is still science.

Not as clear & definitive as I would like.......2006-05-22

I did not find a clear and definitive statement of what the author means by the term "cladistics", as opposed to the old "scenario-based" evolutionary plots: He mostly spends time defining what it is not, because it is not "unscientific", like the older approach. He seems to be aware of that as well, because he re-uses the same arguments in almost every chapter, as if not convinced that he has conveyed his point (and he's probably right). The book seems to fall between two chairs: It's not really aimed at someone professional, who needs a definitive and clear-cut statement; and it's not truly accessible to someone not of the field, who needs more of a build-up in terms of content, and who will not appreciate all the "inside baseball" stories. Possibly Gee has been working for Nature so long that he thinks of its readership as a "general audience", but it's not: I suspect most of the readers of Nature read with interest the papers in their own fields, and skip or skim the rest.

It's too bad, because the topic is of interest, and there is lots of good material in this book. But it really ought to be structured as a whole book, with clear build-up to the arguments and facts; and not as loosely as it is (almost a sequence of passes at the same set of concepts).

What we can learn from fossils.......2005-02-11

The title of "Deep Time" refers to the immense gulfs of time that separate the major events in evolution. The best known of these is the gap of 65 million years between the disappearance of the dinosaurs and the present, but this only one of many, and by no means the largest. More important than the size of these gaps for Henry Gee's arguments, however, is their emptiness: there are extremely few fossils to provide landmarks, and many of these are damaged, incomplete, and in general unsatisfactory. "Incomplete" is, indeed, a weak word to convey the idea that one worn fragment of a jawbone may be all there is for trying to reconstruct a whole animal. Fossils thus offer nothing that resembles a historical record. Gee considers that trying to reconstruct evolution on the basis of so little information requires far more rigorous methods than those that were in general use before the development of cladistics.

Most of his book, therefore, is an attempt to convince readers of the rightness of the cladistic approach, in which the only consideration is the branching of lineages into separate lines of descent. In this scheme it makes sense to classify organisms into clades, where a clade contains only those individuals that are derived from a single ancestral branchpoint. This sounds rather abstract, and in many accounts it is, but Gee does a good job of explaining what he means in a comprehensible way. He is particularly interested in fish, and they illustrate well how the cladistic approach has transformed ideas of how organisms should be classified. According to him, a fish is something you buy in a fish shop, and has no deeper meaning than that. This is because some "fish" are more closely related to mammals than they are to other "fish". As a more familiar example, there is now scarcely any doubt that chimpanzees and gorillas are much more closely related to humans than they are to other apes, orang utans and gibbons. There can be no clade, therefore, than includes all these apes but does not include humans.

Although in general Gee's argument is clear and convincing, he oversimplifies when he tries to justify the cladistic method in terms of parsimony -- the guiding principle that the preferred reconstruction of a history is the one that involves the fewest hypothetical events. The problem here is that he says far too little about the rooting of phylogenetic trees. The example that he uses is the set of three individuals that consist of himself and his two cats, and he claims that parsimony requires a classification in which the two cats are more closely related to one another than either of them is to him. This conclusion, however, owes everything to common sense and nothing to parsimony, because in an unrooted tree with only three branches exactly the same number of events are needed to connect the tree individuals regardless of which of the three one thinks is the least closely related. Because cladistics is concerned only with the branchpoints and not with the lengths of the branches, classifying Gee with one of his cats, but with a very long branch linking him to the branchpoint, is just as parsimonious as a tree that classifies the two cats together.

The book stands somewhat apart from many popular books on evolution in that it is much more about anatomy than about behaviour or molecular genetics. Both of these last two get mentioned, of course, but really what interests Gee the most is what we can learn from fossils. Nonetheless, he does not expect readers to be able to interpret fossils themselves, only to believe that the experts who do this know what they are talking about. As a result, the emphasis on anatomy does not prevent the account from being thoroughly readable. As I have mentioned, Gee is interested in fish, and this illustrates another feature that is unusual in popular books, that it has far less about humans and hominids than many books: the beginning and end are mainly concerned with human origins and evolution, but much of the middle part is not. Likewise he is much less obsessed with dinosaurs that many popular writers on evolution appear to be.

Clarifying with cladistics?.......2004-09-07

Henry Gee is like a hustling salesman. You can picture him on late-night TV flogging veggie choppers. While firmly disparaging his competition, he regales you with the wonders of his product. In this book, the competition is "adaptation" and "convergence" in evolution. The product is "cladistics". It's a new way of looking at the physical traits of Nature's plants and creatures and their evolutionary relationships. Gee is an expressive and persuasive writer. His foundation in palaeontology gives him an intimate knowledge of the science. His salesmanship, however, tends to the excessive. Like the TV promoter's pitch, when you buy the product and examine it closely, you find you've paid for more than you receive.

Gee's title, and the premise of cladistics, is that we can't see very far into the past. Historical continuity, with documents, paintings, letters and memories perhaps reinforced by family ties, doesn't grant us much depth of vision. How much, he asks, do you know about your great-grandparents? With fossils, he stresses, drawing "family" lineages is a process imbued with imprecision. He scorns anthropologists claiming to see a traceable picture of Homo sapiens' ancestry from to some hillside tooth fragment from the Rift Valley. He deems all that remote past with its scattered fossils so wonderfully explained by palaeontologists "deep time". Which, of course, covers all evolution's history.

The author's arguments as he builds his case are multilevel. He doesn't trust stratigraphy to pinpoint relationships in time - a species "A" may have survived to live parallel to a new branch "B". Yet our fossil sequence may show the "A" living later than "B". That alone, he claims, renders any assessment of adaptations suspect. Physical traits we see in fossils are often labelled "pre-adaptations" since it appears "primitive" traits may have gained in complexity over time to become more useful. Gee dismisses these sequences as unsubstantiated. "Testable" theories of evolution's process become meaningless. This is hardly news - little in the fossil record is "testable". In any case, cladistics wholly ignores evolution as a "process". It is a series of snapshots of "events".

Instead of "relating narratives" as he accuses his fellow palaeontologists of doing, Gee wants them to more closely study physical relationships. What characteristics can be identified, and how do these relate among species? Dogs, cats, and cows are clearly four-legged animals with vertebrae. So are fish, birds and crocodiles. Cladistics allows you to portray life in new arrangements of "cousinship". Gee declares these new relationships allow us to see life "as it is", not how we "want it to be". The relationships are graphically presented in what are known as "cladograms". For Gee, these diagrams portraying characteristic similarities are more meaningful than speculative diagrams about descent lineages. They also, it turns out, support Stephen Gould's notion of "punctuated equilibrium" over the "adaptationist programme" of neo-Darwinism.

Gee wants to abandon "traditional" fossil hunting and interpretation with a "revolution" [his term] - a turnover to cladistics. His proposal to banish "inference" from accumulated fossils and their context and replace it with a strict methodology is not sound. Traits, no matter how ancient or enigmatic, represent the lifestyle of their possessor. Sciencists may make proposals about how a species lived that are later overturned by new evidence. Cladistics acts as a tool to assess those evaluations, not overturn them. The book is valuable for explaining how cladistics can be used. Gee's strident tone and overassertive style dulls its cutting edge, however. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

A little bit honest...At least that's a start.......2004-01-21

Dr. Gee is honest enough to admit that the fossil record will never be able to shed light on ancestry and descent of various species. He is not honest enough to admit that the concept of macroevolion is nothing more than fanciful, atheistic superstition.

Evolutionary Patterns: Growth, Form, and Tempo in the Fossil Record

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Evolutionary Patterns: Growth, Form, and Tempo in the Fossil Record

Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0226389316

Book Description

With all the recent advances in molecular and evolutionary biology, one could almost wonder why we need the fossil record. Molecular sequence data can resolve taxonomic relationships, experiments with fruit flies demonstrate evolution and development in real time, and field studies of Galapagos finches have provided the strongest evidence for natural selection ever measured in the wild. What, then, can fossils teach us that living organisms cannot?

Evolutionary Patterns demonstrates the rich variety of clues to evolution that can be gleaned from the fossil record. Chief among these are the major trends and anomalies in species development revealed only by "deep time," such as periodic mass extinctions and species that remain unchanged in form for millions of years. Contributors explore modes of development, the tempo of speciation and extinction, and macroevolutionary patterns and trends. The result is an important contribution to paleobiology and evolutionary biology, and a spirited defense of the fossil record as a crucial tool for understanding evolution and development.

The contributors are Ann F. Budd, Efstathia Bura, Leo W. Buss, Mike Foote, Jörn Geister, Stephen Jay Gould, Eckart Hâkansson, Jean-Georges Harmelin, Lee-Ann C. Hayek, Jeremy B. C. Jackson, Kenneth G. Johnson, Nancy Knowlton, Scott Lidgard, Frank K. McKinney, Daniel W. McShea, Ross H. Nehm, Beth Okamura, John M. Pandolfi, Paul D. Taylor, and Erik Thomsen.

Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record (Systematics Association Special Volume)

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Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record (Systematics Association Special Volume)

Manufacturer: CRC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Morphology, Shape and Phylogeny (Systematics Association Special Volume)

ASIN: 0415275245

Book Description

Determining the precise timing for the evolutionary origin of groups of organisms has become increasingly important as scientists from diverse disciplines attempt to examine rates of anatomical or molecular evolution and correlate intrinsic biological events to extrinsic environmental events. Molecular clock analyses indicate that many major groups are twice as old, or more, than a literal reading of the fossil record attests, implying that the fossil record is incomplete. Few paleontologists agree that the fossil record is inadequate, arguing instead that our understanding of the molecular clock is far from ideal. Telling the Evolutionary Time: Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record represents a discussion between molecular biologists and paleontologists, in which they investigate the significance of competing sources of data, explain the nature of molecular clocks and the fossil record, and strive to develop compromise models that incorporate contradictory opinions. These are presented as a series of case studies dealing with many of the most important groups of complex organisms, such as protists, land plants, flowering plants, complex animals, chordates, vertebrates, tetrapods, and modern birds. Bringing fresh insight and various perspectives to a complicated argument, this book assembles all sides of the debate into one comprehensive text. It is a significant volume for research scientists and advanced students across the field of evolutionary biology.

Evolution For Dummies (For Dummies (Math & Science))

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Evolution For Dummies (For Dummies (Math & Science))
Greg Krukonis
Manufacturer: For Dummies
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books

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Today, most colleges and universities offer evolutionary study as part of their biology curriculums. Evolution For Dummies will track a class in which evolution is taught and give an objective scientific view of the subject. This balanced guide explores the history and future of evolution, explaining the concepts and science behind it, offering case studies that support it, and comparing evolution with rival theories of creation, such as intelligent design. It also will identify the signs of evolution in the world around us and explain how this theory affects our everyday lives and the future to come.

Greg Krukonis, PhD (Portland, OR) received his doctorate from the University of Arizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is a former assistant adjunct professor at Lewis and Clark College, where he taught evolution.

Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record

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A story of life, the sea...fossils...Planet Earth!
As good as palaeontology gets! Sagan would be proud! A+
Evolution gets its start
A beautiful, well-written view of past life in the ocean!

Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea, and Dancing to the Fossil Record
Bradford Matsen
Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0898157781

Customer Reviews:

A story of life, the sea...fossils...Planet Earth!.......2006-07-22

I bought this book essentially to serve as additional curriculum support to my 'Science & The Art of Discovery' workshop designed for kids, 8-12. I have kept it in the office library where the kids can have ready access.

Participating kids often like to take out the book to browse. I often find them transfixed with awe.

The book is a wonderful visual & intellectual treat. The printed text integrates natural history, paleontology, geology, & biology into a wholistic narrative about the origins of all life on earth.

I like to conclude this review with a quotation from the book: "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time. (T S Elliot, 'Four Quartets')"

I would enthusiastically recommend this entertaining book to your kids, particularly when they have an interest in science.

As good as palaeontology gets! Sagan would be proud! A+.......2005-02-16

The late Carl Sagan thought that science should be "user-friendly," presented not in jargon but in regular English. He believed that the general public could -- and should -- have access to the latest scientific discoveries.

Sagan would be proud of _Planet Ocean._ The central theme of the book is stated clearly on page 1: "Nature is a workshop, not a temple." Matsen spends the rest of the book supporting this concept, explaining that life is not a stately, well-executed design where species climb a ladder of progress; rather, evolution is an inescapable and completely random condition. Animals and plants breed, have offspring that are slightly different, and continue to become slightly more different with each successive generation until the distant grandkids look nothing like the original parent. In addition, through totally weird, sometimes avoidable and sometimes unavoidable circumstances, the species as a whole will either do very well, or get pushed out of the scene. The environment works like the stock market -- fortunes are made, and fortunes are lost. (The metaphor of "rolling the dice" comes up more than once.)

Matsen's prose is engaging, entertaining, and extremely informative. In one of my favorite sections, he describes the success of the trilobites (who survived for 300 million years in Earth's oceans):

"They would eat anything and breed anywhere, and they made themselves as unattractive to predators as possible. We all have relatives like them. From [trilobites] and their success and longevity, an evolutionary rule of thumb has emerged: 'The more specialized a species, the less able to cope with change it will be once the inevitable happens and old habitats change beyond the point of recognition' [...]. In other words, generalists usually outlast specialists, and evolutionary progress is not necessarily a matter of refinement. [...] Ninety percent of success is just showing up. Ask an arthropod, like a trilobite or a cockroach. [...] Generalism won't get you to Carnegie Hall with your cello, but a cockroach doesn't need a cello." (p. 14).

This conversational tone is used throughout the book, and it really works. Matsen's prose reminds one of an after-class discussion with a very generous, patient biology teacher -- the kind you always wished you had, and didn't. Matsen takes otherwise very difficult subject matter and explains it in understandable terms that don't insult the intelligence of the reader. He even suggests amusing mnemonics to remember the order of epochs in the Palaezoic and Mesozoic eras ("Crying over sleeping dragons may puzzle people, terrify, (or) joyfully convert") as well as for the Cenozoic era ("Palaeontologists eat only murky plankton porridge hot").

Interwoven with the education that Matsen offers is the story of his and artist Ray Troll's voyage of discovery. Brad and Ray actually travelled to many of the sites discussed in the book, and the little personal touches -- Brad's vision of the Cretacious sea as they drove across Kansas, Ray's discovery and naming of a totally new species of pterasaur, and the fishing trips enjoyed by both -- really draw in the reader. One becomes intimate with the friendly voice, the casual, personal stories, and history of life on Earth.

Not to be missed, of course, is the wonderful art. Ray Troll is a meticulous artist, and his offbeat sense of humor is perfectly in place with the spirit of the book. For example, his illustration of a lungfish's hesitant voyage out of water is captioned, "Out of the ooze and born to cruise." Not to be missed are his "ads" for a wrist watch that measures geologic time; Burgess Brand Primordial Soup; and that great French wine, Chateau Mosasaur. Doodles, sketches, and highly detailed pastel paintings are strewn throughout, and they are worth the price of the book by themselves. (Interested readers can preview some of Ray's art at his homepage, www.trollart.com)

This book is an excellent introduction to evolution, palaeontology, marine biology, and/or marine science. Alternately light and serious, one is sorry to finish the book. It -- like the 650 million year history it encapsulates -- is such a joy to experience. Highly recommended.

Evolution gets its start.......2004-09-10

Brad Matsen and Ray Troll's "Planet Ocean" is a lively swim through the fossil record, beginning at the beginning 650 million years ago in the watery depths.

Troll's whimsical illustrations accompany Matsen's humorously accessible explanations of what we've learned - and think we've learned - from the earliest fossils. Matsen traces evolution from the primordial soup to the first colonies of multicellular organisms to the ubiquitous trilobytes - "the most diverse and successful animals on Planet Ocean until the Permian extinction claimed the last of them."

He discusses the engineering that went into chambers (the nautilus) and hard shells and the arrival of backbones and speculates (with the experts) on the role of extinctions in evolution, including our own.

Although he sometimes demolishes or supports theories without sufficient scientific explanation, Matsen's watery perspective is well-organized and refreshing and Troll's drawings and paintings are as likely to be detailed and informative as they are fanciful and quirky.

A beautiful, well-written view of past life in the ocean!.......1998-06-25

This book was a pleasure to read- even though it was mostly facts (and this is coming from a teenager)! Sure, I love learning about evolution and fossils, but I rarely sit down to read long, boring books about it. But this book is fresh, colorful, full of information, and INTERESTING!!! I congratulate the author and illustrator for putting out such a masterpiece! It is sure to recruit paleontologists for the next generation!

Evolution of Herbivory in Terrestrial Vertebrates: Perspectives from the Fossil Record

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Evolution of Herbivory in Terrestrial Vertebrates: Perspectives from the Fossil Record

Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521021197

Book Description

Although herbivory probably first appeared over 300 million years ago, it only became established as a common feeding strategy during Late Permian times. Subsequently, herbivory evolved in numerous lineages of terrestrial vertebrates, and the acquisition of this mode of feeding was frequently associated with considerable evolutionary diversification in those lineages. This book represents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of herbivory in land-dwelling amniote tetrapods in recent years. In Evolution of Herbivory in Terrestrial Vertebrates, leading experts review the evolutionary history and structural adaptations required for feeding on plants in the major groups of land-dwelling vertebrates, especially dinosaurs and ungulate mammals. As such, this volume will be the definitive reference source on this topic for evolutionary biologists and vertebrate paleontologists.

Mammoths, Mastodonts, and Elephants: Biology, Behavior and the Fossil Record

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A comprehensive study of proboscidean kill sites

Mammoths, Mastodonts, and Elephants: Biology, Behavior and the Fossil Record
Gary Haynes
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0521456916

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The diminishing population of African and Asian elephants can be compared to the extinction of other elephant-like species, such as mammoths and mastodonts, which occurred more than ten thousand years ago. The purpose of this book is to use the ecology and behavior of modern elephants to create models for reconstructing the life and death of extinct mammoths and mastodonts. The source of the models is a long-term and continuing study of elephants in Zimbabwe, Africa. These models are clearly described with respect to the anatomical, behavioral, and ecological similarities between past and present proboscideans. The implications of these similarities on the life and death of mammoths and mastodonts is explored in detail. The importance of this book is primarily its unifying perspective on living and extinct proboscideans: the fossil record is closely examined and compared to the natural history of surviving elephants. Dr. Haynes's studies of the places where African elephants die (so-called elephant burial grounds) are unique.

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A comprehensive study of proboscidean kill sites.......1999-11-10

Gary Haynes has done marvelous research in the study of known-cause elephant death sites and has used this research to present a very logical comparison to pre-historic proboscidean remains. This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in mammoths and the various extinction theories.

Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record

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Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record

Manufacturer: creation -life publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000B741ZW

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