I almost never abandon a book before the end. For this one, I'm making an exception. It's essentially a series of vignettes about particular animals over the course of the last 100 million years. The author goes to great lengths to flesh out the lives of the fauna at various stages of evolution.

Unfortunately, he's managed to take a fascinating subject and make it as dry and unengaging as humanly possible. It's likely that the sun will enter its red giant phase before I could force myself to finish it.