The Earth Through Time

by Harold L. Levin

This top-selling historical geology text provides an excellent balance of basic geology and paleontology. THE EARTH THROUGH TIME provides rich, authoritative coverage of the history of the Earth, offering the most comprehensive history of the earth on the market today. It maintains its strong approach to stratigraphy and paleontology that others have lost, while updating new finds in areas of radiometric dating, stratigraphic nomenclature, and renewed ideas in paleontology (e.g., new discoveries of dinosaurs, mass extinctions, and current information found in the literature). The paleogeographic maps are excellent in detail and are a vital component in understanding the earth's history.

Genres: Science, Geology, Textbooks, Nonfiction, History, Natural History, Evolution

608 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1983

Reviews

[Lisa]

The Earth Through Time by Harold L. Levin (2003)

[Avery]

Absolutely amazing book about earth's geological time, with incredible illustrations through out.

It's an older book, so there are some things that are not completely up to date. But it still provides a solid overview of the formation of earth and deep time!

[Carol]

Opened my eyes to how he planet and life evolved on it occured

[Kyle]

If you're looking for a summary of geological and paleontological history of the world (though with a bit more of a focus on North America) this is an excellent way to learn it. Plenty of figures and fairly engaging to read. It is still a textbook, but it really does have the history of Earth through time.

My only complaints are that some of the calculations in the book were clearly done wrong for subjects outside of geology. The amount of helium produced by the sun, the volume of the protonebula for the solar system, and some cases where it would need to be "billion billion" rather than "billion" to be accurate. Perhaps these are pedantic points, in that the point of the textbook was to emphasize the largeness of some values, but with a physics/mathematics background I cannot just let them stand.

[Heather]

A wealth of information. It focuses slightly more on geology than on prehistoric life, but it still has solid sections on the latter.