It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. Life teems through Henry Gee’s lyrical prose – colossal supercontinents drift, collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today. This became the nucleus of the cell—the cell’s library, repository of genetic information, its memory, and its heritage. All dinosaurs came from eggs but as they slowly began to evolve they began to move beyond laying eggs and began new ways of reproduction. From a geological perspective, humanity is but a blip on the map, and may not even make as meaningful an impact on the Earth as much smaller, and more simple forms of life.

And yet it was a sudden surge of free oxygen that caused the Great Oxidation Event, unleashing the first of many mass extinctions that pepper the history of this planet.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. The fascinating life of our distant ancestors, Homo Erectus is also fascinating, as are the many and varied human-like cousins that once inhabited the Earth. billion years ago from the dust of a new sun being born along with all the other planets that we know of our solar system. Ich finde, man merkt dem Autor die Leidenschaft des Themas an und für alle, die sich allgemein für die Weltgeschichte interessieren, ist das Buch sicherlich lesenswert.

And I feel less compelled by the chronological view, because one cannot avoid a sense of determinism and teleology, where the retrospective view imho much better emphasizes the contingency in the evolutionary progress. It had been burning for millions of years; now the fusion furnace at its core had no more fuel to burn. We know this not only through our ability to analyse DNA nowadays but from the hollow bones, the way that they breathe and the fact that all dinosaurs laid eggs.Especially in the early parts of the book, and the 'eons' most remote in the past, all the names of slimes, algae, cells and the earliest creatures are a bit alien and daunting. BACKBONE AND MOVING FROM SEA TO LAND: After this, creatures began to form a singular tube which ran from their mouth to their anus – the gut. These wetlands eventually dried out to become the Makgadikgadi Pan, which is one of the world’s largest salt pans, located in the middle of the dry savanna of northeastern Botswana. Gee puts the focus more on anatomical issues in the creatures he describes, whilst Halliday has achieved a more evocative, possibly imaginary - even poetic - view on the environment (which Gee does not neglect, thus the Snowball earths make as prominent appearances as the tectonic shifts).

Se você quer um resumo da vida na Terra, redigido com o que há de mais atual em ciência, este livro é para você. THE RISE OF MAMMALS AND HUMANS: And then finally about 7 million years ago they began to exist upright humanoids which we know there have been at least eight and probably more, animals that could walk upright and appear similar to humans and apes.The only unfortunate omission is the inclusion of some sketches or illustrations to show the reader what some of the fascinating creatures might have looked like. A brief history of life on Earth by Henry Gee is a short history of life on earth, concise but wonderfully told. Every time majority of flora and fauna gets wiped out (Five mass extinctions), life always reappeared and took a different direction in the evolutionary path. It's probably necessary to keep up the momentum, but I would have liked a proviso in the introduction. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.