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Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life
It greatly puzzled Darwin that the most ancient rocks, those dating before the Cambrian period, seemed to be barren of fossils when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Decades of work by modern paleontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian. Yet hidden in these depths is a great mystery--something happened around the Cambrian to dramatically speed up evolution and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today--and scientists don't really know what provided that spark.
In this vibrantly written book, Martin Brasier, a leading paleontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Brasier is a master storyteller. As he explains what we now know of the strange creatures of these truly ancient times--540 million years ago--he takes readers to many far flung places around the globe, interweaving an engaging account of cutting-edge science with colorful and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, and other remote places. As he shows, decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks--piecing together the puzzle of the Cambrian Explosion--is very challenging work. What they have discovered is that, just at the beginning of the Cambrian period, animals (mostly worms) began burrowing into the mud. Why they suddenly began burrowing, and how this might have changed the atmosphere, may be important clues to the mystery. Brasier gives his own take on the emerging answers, as one of the leading players in the field.
A richly readable account of exciting expeditions and leading-edge science, Darwin's Lost World is a must-have book for all natural history buffs.
"A rollicking account of Brasier's adventures seeking an answer to a question that vexed Charles Darwin."
--Library Journal
"Engaging." --New Scientist
"If there is one book in this crop that Darwin himself would surely have appreciated, it is Darwin's Lost World."
--Financial Times
In this vibrantly written book, Martin Brasier, a leading paleontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Brasier is a master storyteller. As he explains what we now know of the strange creatures of these truly ancient times--540 million years ago--he takes readers to many far flung places around the globe, interweaving an engaging account of cutting-edge science with colorful and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, and other remote places. As he shows, decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks--piecing together the puzzle of the Cambrian Explosion--is very challenging work. What they have discovered is that, just at the beginning of the Cambrian period, animals (mostly worms) began burrowing into the mud. Why they suddenly began burrowing, and how this might have changed the atmosphere, may be important clues to the mystery. Brasier gives his own take on the emerging answers, as one of the leading players in the field.
A richly readable account of exciting expeditions and leading-edge science, Darwin's Lost World is a must-have book for all natural history buffs.
"A rollicking account of Brasier's adventures seeking an answer to a question that vexed Charles Darwin."
--Library Journal
"Engaging." --New Scientist
"If there is one book in this crop that Darwin himself would surely have appreciated, it is Darwin's Lost World."
--Financial Times
320 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2009
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175 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 9, 2020
Although the timeline of early life is subject to differing interpretations, the current thinking is that it began around 3.8 billion years ago. The simple cells split into two early groups, the bacteria and the archaea, although which one was first is still undetermined. For over a billion and a half years life stayed that way, but around two billion years ago the first complex single cells evolved, the eukaryotes, with nuclei and other internal organelles. About 1.5 billion years ago the eukaryotes split in three groups: animals, plants, and fungi. Yet another long period of evolutionary stasis occurred until some time around 900 million years ago (MYA), multicellular life first appeared. According to Nick Lane, in his book Life Ascending, it took this long because this was a one-time, extraordinary, one in a trillion event where two cells merged without one consuming the other, and instead entered into a symbiotic relationship which vastly increased the new cell’s ability to survive and thrive. “The eukaryotic cell only evolved once because the union of two prokaryotes, in which one gains entry to another, is truly a rare event, a genuinely fateful encounter. All that we hold dear in this life, all the marvels of our world, stem from a single event that embodied both chance and necessity.”
The advantages of multicellularity gave evolution the opportunity to diversify plant and animal forms into the available environmental niches, and for another three hundred million years the successful experiments, such as bilateral symmetry, spread and flourished in the oceans. These early forms were tiny and soft-bodied, and did not leave fossils, although in some cases their presence could be inferred from the traces left behind, such as tracks and burrows. The first, disputed, fossils date from about 580 MYA but by 565 MYA there is clear evidence of animals having evolved the ability to move under their own power. The Cambrian Explosion started around 540 MYA and lasted for about 20 million years. By that time the great phyla of life had already come into existence. Evolution was exploiting all the available niches, and the predator/prey arms race was in full swing, with teeth and claws pitted against speed and shells.
This book concentrates on those early, faint traces of life, citing facts where facts are available, and making inferences where there is no direct evidence. It is also a book about what paleontologists really do, as opposed to what many people think they do. It all sounds exciting and romantic until you realize that the field work often involves sitting in the dirt all day long brushing away soil centimetre by centimetre with a trowel, and then back to the laboratory to spend years laboriously extracting fossils from the surrounding matrix using tiny dental drills.
Charles Darwin took decades after this voyage on the Beagle to review the evidence he had collected, and to amass new evidence from his studies of barnacles and discussions with dog and pigeon breeders. He slowly, almost reluctantly, came to the conclusion that evolution is real and that natural selection is the engine which drives it. When he published Origin of Species in 1859 he made a strong case, but there were still unanswered questions, which his opponents were quick to cite as evidence of the weakness of his arguments. These questions included how evolution could account for altruism such as in ant and bee communities, or how the early stages of complex structures, like as an eye or a wing, could have provided survival advantages great enough to allow them to be passed along to their descendants. He was also concerned that life seemed to have just popped into existence in the Cambrian era, since the earlier rocks looked to be barren of life. In time, of course, all of these objections have been elegantly answered, and in the case of early life the evidence was there all along, but it was too tiny to see.
Dr. Brasier has spent his professional life examining the minute traces of early living things, and has traveled the world in search of answers. He recounts digs in such far flung places as Siberia, Outer Mongolia, China, and the Australian Outback, as well as Scotland, Newfoundland, and the Caribbean. The description of each place adds a piece to the puzzle, and since knowledge is cumulative, as the book progresses the reader comes to a better and more complete understanding of what was going on in those early millions of years before evolution lit the fuse of change.
The book looks at evolution from the perspective of environments rather than individual species. A species is the way it is because it has evolved to exploit a specific niche, and its ability to further evolve is constrained by the other species around it. When the environments are stable the plants and animals reach the point where they are almost perfectly adapted, and fossils show that they can remain unchanged for millions of years. When something disturbs the environment, however, such as the arrival of a new predator, or a heating or cooling event that wipes out some of the other species, the door is open for evolution to try new shapes and behaviors. All this can happen quickly, too. In Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth he recounts experiments with zebra fish which showed that, in the absence of predators, within a few generations males evolved bright colors to attract females, but with predators present they quickly developed duller spotted patterns to mimic the color of the stream bottom.
Although written in an easy to read style, this book is for people who already know something about evolution and are interested in how it works and what it shows about how life changed and adapted in the eons before humankind. There is something satisfying about seeing the slow accumulation of knowledge, as one new fact supports the ones that came before and provides a starting point for further ideas. This is science well done: evidence-based, cautious about making bold pronouncements, careful to ensure that when the author presents an idea that is not fully supported by existing findings it is identified as plausible but conjectural. I enjoyed the book and learned some interesting things from it.
The advantages of multicellularity gave evolution the opportunity to diversify plant and animal forms into the available environmental niches, and for another three hundred million years the successful experiments, such as bilateral symmetry, spread and flourished in the oceans. These early forms were tiny and soft-bodied, and did not leave fossils, although in some cases their presence could be inferred from the traces left behind, such as tracks and burrows. The first, disputed, fossils date from about 580 MYA but by 565 MYA there is clear evidence of animals having evolved the ability to move under their own power. The Cambrian Explosion started around 540 MYA and lasted for about 20 million years. By that time the great phyla of life had already come into existence. Evolution was exploiting all the available niches, and the predator/prey arms race was in full swing, with teeth and claws pitted against speed and shells.
This book concentrates on those early, faint traces of life, citing facts where facts are available, and making inferences where there is no direct evidence. It is also a book about what paleontologists really do, as opposed to what many people think they do. It all sounds exciting and romantic until you realize that the field work often involves sitting in the dirt all day long brushing away soil centimetre by centimetre with a trowel, and then back to the laboratory to spend years laboriously extracting fossils from the surrounding matrix using tiny dental drills.
Charles Darwin took decades after this voyage on the Beagle to review the evidence he had collected, and to amass new evidence from his studies of barnacles and discussions with dog and pigeon breeders. He slowly, almost reluctantly, came to the conclusion that evolution is real and that natural selection is the engine which drives it. When he published Origin of Species in 1859 he made a strong case, but there were still unanswered questions, which his opponents were quick to cite as evidence of the weakness of his arguments. These questions included how evolution could account for altruism such as in ant and bee communities, or how the early stages of complex structures, like as an eye or a wing, could have provided survival advantages great enough to allow them to be passed along to their descendants. He was also concerned that life seemed to have just popped into existence in the Cambrian era, since the earlier rocks looked to be barren of life. In time, of course, all of these objections have been elegantly answered, and in the case of early life the evidence was there all along, but it was too tiny to see.
Dr. Brasier has spent his professional life examining the minute traces of early living things, and has traveled the world in search of answers. He recounts digs in such far flung places as Siberia, Outer Mongolia, China, and the Australian Outback, as well as Scotland, Newfoundland, and the Caribbean. The description of each place adds a piece to the puzzle, and since knowledge is cumulative, as the book progresses the reader comes to a better and more complete understanding of what was going on in those early millions of years before evolution lit the fuse of change.
The book looks at evolution from the perspective of environments rather than individual species. A species is the way it is because it has evolved to exploit a specific niche, and its ability to further evolve is constrained by the other species around it. When the environments are stable the plants and animals reach the point where they are almost perfectly adapted, and fossils show that they can remain unchanged for millions of years. When something disturbs the environment, however, such as the arrival of a new predator, or a heating or cooling event that wipes out some of the other species, the door is open for evolution to try new shapes and behaviors. All this can happen quickly, too. In Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth he recounts experiments with zebra fish which showed that, in the absence of predators, within a few generations males evolved bright colors to attract females, but with predators present they quickly developed duller spotted patterns to mimic the color of the stream bottom.
Although written in an easy to read style, this book is for people who already know something about evolution and are interested in how it works and what it shows about how life changed and adapted in the eons before humankind. There is something satisfying about seeing the slow accumulation of knowledge, as one new fact supports the ones that came before and provides a starting point for further ideas. This is science well done: evidence-based, cautious about making bold pronouncements, careful to ensure that when the author presents an idea that is not fully supported by existing findings it is identified as plausible but conjectural. I enjoyed the book and learned some interesting things from it.
June 11, 2015
When I picked this up, I didn’t really register that I’d been disappointed by one of the author’s other books. Good thing it was a library book, because though the topic of the most ancient remains of life is fascinating, Brasier’s account jumps around geologically and logically. There’s no straight progression from idea to idea, era to era, area to area. I kept losing track of where a fossil was and how old it was thought to be, and getting distracted by Brasier’s anecdotes (almost boasting) about places he’d been looking for fossils.
Also, I don’t know if Brasier is English or Welsh or what, but my teeth started slowly grinding when he brought in Arthurian analogies. Arthur never looked for the grail, never. It’s the same issue with basic facts that I found in Secret Chambers when he repeated common apocryphal stories as fact, except even more personally annoying because this is Arthur and I spent most of my degree studying Arthur as deeply as Brasier studies fossils. It’s an idiosyncratic reaction, I know, but it was still annoying. The Arthurian stuff felt weird, shoehorned in, especially when Brasier was doing research for Oxford University in Scotland. I could understand it more if he was a fellow of a Welsh university or something.
Originally posted here.
Also, I don’t know if Brasier is English or Welsh or what, but my teeth started slowly grinding when he brought in Arthurian analogies. Arthur never looked for the grail, never. It’s the same issue with basic facts that I found in Secret Chambers when he repeated common apocryphal stories as fact, except even more personally annoying because this is Arthur and I spent most of my degree studying Arthur as deeply as Brasier studies fossils. It’s an idiosyncratic reaction, I know, but it was still annoying. The Arthurian stuff felt weird, shoehorned in, especially when Brasier was doing research for Oxford University in Scotland. I could understand it more if he was a fellow of a Welsh university or something.
Originally posted here.
August 31, 2021
Сразу подумала, как непросто было Рейчел с Россом Геллером) Палеонтология для чайников, мне было интересно. Автор, конечно, перегибает примерно постоянно с "русскими, которые пьют водку за рулем самолета". Ещё говорят, проверить я этого никак не могу, что информация устарела, книга издана в 2009, и якобы за последнее время всё сильно изменилось. Вряд ли я когда-то узнаю, что именно изменилось
June 28, 2014
As a kid I regularly read non-fiction books on a wide range of topics (but mostly biology, astronomy and paleontology), so that when I reached high school I had little new to learn on those topics. But unfortunately I became a somewhat fundamentalist christian and read only bible study books for a while. Even after a harsh burn out, I still thought I had to read christian books in between my fantasy en SF reading. The habit of prescribing myself books instead of reading what interests me was hard to break. So this is the first non christian non fiction book I have read in quite a while. And it was great! So I'll be definitely expand my reading in non fiction, and soak up research, insights and facts like I did before.
But enough about me, on to the book! The book is about a topic that has always interested me: the evolution of life and the beginning of complex, multicellular life on earth. It didn't disappoint. The author was involved with a lot of the research of the beginning of life, and he tells of his travels to Siberia, Mongolia, Australia, Newfoundland and Schotland where the oldest fossils are found. This part, almost an adventure novel in places, was fun to read and conveyed the joy of scientific discovery. In between was a lot of history of scientific thought too, as we go back to Darwin and his contemporaries, who (due to a lack of fossil finds) wondered why there were no fossils in the precambrian, and how if there were none, the diversity of life in the cambrian came to be. Very interesting to chart the alternative theories proposed in those days, contrasted with the new, more recent finds that confirmed or denied them. Then there are the descriptions of primitive life itself, very enlightening, and even though I read a lot about paleontology online, there was a lot I did not know about the most primitive forms of life. I would have liked to read more about the vendobionts (the ediacaran fauna), that seems not to correspond to any known forms of current life.
Most interesting to me were a couple of insights in the nature of evolution, that I hadn't thought about before. Such as the fact that evolution is not a matter of species evolving in a linear way, it is a matter of eco-systems evolving. This means that even though a jellyfish is one of the most primitive organisms in the ocean now, there were no jellyfish in the precambrian. Because the current jellyfish is the way it is because there's more complex life around: it lives the way it lives (with stinging cells) because there are fish and shrimp around. The same holds for anemones and corals - and for sponges even! - they cannot exist as corals or sponges without complex life. So the equivalents of jellyfish, sponges and corals in the primitive ocean did not look or act or live like the current ones, they would have been quite different. We would not even recognize them as corals, sponges or jellyfish. A bit like the ediacaran fauna maybe? When more comples lives develops, the whole ecosystem changes and evolves with it, and these processes cannot be seperated. There's another great example in here about the effect of worms - because what we now think of as soil (aereated, full of life) is not possible without complex life burrowing in it. Before worms the seabottom was a toxic, anaerobic place! Which had it's own effect on species and plants. So, everything is interrelated. Thus, evolution is something that involves the whole. It is an effect of the complex system searching for an equilibrium. Here the author adds chaos theory to the mix. The sudden rise of multicellular, complex life was the effect of the complex system of unicellar life reaching a crisis and then the effects growing like a fractal. The rise of humans and the development of consciousness is still fall out from this system seeking a new equilibrium. Fascinating stuff to think about, especially the consequences for a christian thinking about evolution. As it seems that this development of the system to give rise to emerging complexity, is a feature of the system itself (just like avalanches from mountain sides seem random, but they flow into the valleys (the 'great attractors' that are part of the mountain sides). So what if God set up the 'great attractars' in the system in just the way this whole organic process would take place? It has consequences for how we view the way God acts in our world today, and gives me hope for the future, as we are still brancing out as a fractal to more and more complexity, to the beauty of the Kingdom that will encompass the whole universe (as the whole system is interconnected), stars, atoms, jellyfish and human beings. And this can all come to pass due to the crisis in the system of the incarnation and resurrection, the effects of which will influence everything and all. I'll be giving this more thought in the future!
But enough about me, on to the book! The book is about a topic that has always interested me: the evolution of life and the beginning of complex, multicellular life on earth. It didn't disappoint. The author was involved with a lot of the research of the beginning of life, and he tells of his travels to Siberia, Mongolia, Australia, Newfoundland and Schotland where the oldest fossils are found. This part, almost an adventure novel in places, was fun to read and conveyed the joy of scientific discovery. In between was a lot of history of scientific thought too, as we go back to Darwin and his contemporaries, who (due to a lack of fossil finds) wondered why there were no fossils in the precambrian, and how if there were none, the diversity of life in the cambrian came to be. Very interesting to chart the alternative theories proposed in those days, contrasted with the new, more recent finds that confirmed or denied them. Then there are the descriptions of primitive life itself, very enlightening, and even though I read a lot about paleontology online, there was a lot I did not know about the most primitive forms of life. I would have liked to read more about the vendobionts (the ediacaran fauna), that seems not to correspond to any known forms of current life.
Most interesting to me were a couple of insights in the nature of evolution, that I hadn't thought about before. Such as the fact that evolution is not a matter of species evolving in a linear way, it is a matter of eco-systems evolving. This means that even though a jellyfish is one of the most primitive organisms in the ocean now, there were no jellyfish in the precambrian. Because the current jellyfish is the way it is because there's more complex life around: it lives the way it lives (with stinging cells) because there are fish and shrimp around. The same holds for anemones and corals - and for sponges even! - they cannot exist as corals or sponges without complex life. So the equivalents of jellyfish, sponges and corals in the primitive ocean did not look or act or live like the current ones, they would have been quite different. We would not even recognize them as corals, sponges or jellyfish. A bit like the ediacaran fauna maybe? When more comples lives develops, the whole ecosystem changes and evolves with it, and these processes cannot be seperated. There's another great example in here about the effect of worms - because what we now think of as soil (aereated, full of life) is not possible without complex life burrowing in it. Before worms the seabottom was a toxic, anaerobic place! Which had it's own effect on species and plants. So, everything is interrelated. Thus, evolution is something that involves the whole. It is an effect of the complex system searching for an equilibrium. Here the author adds chaos theory to the mix. The sudden rise of multicellular, complex life was the effect of the complex system of unicellar life reaching a crisis and then the effects growing like a fractal. The rise of humans and the development of consciousness is still fall out from this system seeking a new equilibrium. Fascinating stuff to think about, especially the consequences for a christian thinking about evolution. As it seems that this development of the system to give rise to emerging complexity, is a feature of the system itself (just like avalanches from mountain sides seem random, but they flow into the valleys (the 'great attractors' that are part of the mountain sides). So what if God set up the 'great attractars' in the system in just the way this whole organic process would take place? It has consequences for how we view the way God acts in our world today, and gives me hope for the future, as we are still brancing out as a fractal to more and more complexity, to the beauty of the Kingdom that will encompass the whole universe (as the whole system is interconnected), stars, atoms, jellyfish and human beings. And this can all come to pass due to the crisis in the system of the incarnation and resurrection, the effects of which will influence everything and all. I'll be giving this more thought in the future!
July 22, 2009
great book very good i love it martin brasier is a very good writer
August 16, 2015
A pretty interesting book for all geologists, that focuses on the quest for the PCC boundary and the origin of life. Brasier's wit is abundant.
March 6, 2020
This is a great written book that is highly entertaining. Although the author is one of the experts in the field of microfossils he really explains the issue of why after the Cambrian age there were no fossils found. This bothered Darwin and other evolution biologists and Brasier is the perfect writer to explain this.
This is not a book written to just explain this discrepancy, but is one of those rare books that describes how science is done. It is a travel guide to paleontology - describing fossil digs of the author. I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed the humor found in the book. This is not a book by some stodgy scientist but is an interesting look at the mistakes and rethinking done to answer an important problem in ecology - why do we see all of these trilobites, other fossils and tracks in Cambrian rocks and nothing in pre-Cambrian rocks? A great look into the life of paleontologists!
This is not a book written to just explain this discrepancy, but is one of those rare books that describes how science is done. It is a travel guide to paleontology - describing fossil digs of the author. I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed the humor found in the book. This is not a book by some stodgy scientist but is an interesting look at the mistakes and rethinking done to answer an important problem in ecology - why do we see all of these trilobites, other fossils and tracks in Cambrian rocks and nothing in pre-Cambrian rocks? A great look into the life of paleontologists!
June 8, 2019
Darwin was puzzled that there was so little fossil evidence of ancestral life before the Cambrian explosion. As his big ideas and theories have been tested and retested in the last 150 years, the pieces of this puzzle have been explored along the way. Professor Brasier (very British) writes beautifully and takes us on a worldwide fossil hunt from China, Outer Mongolia, Australia, the Caribbean, Newfoundland (etc.) and back to Scotland where some of the oldest rocks on the planet reside. Of course there are pre-Cambrian fossils. They are just very small (microcopic). Brasier starts us out at 520 million years ago and end at about a billion years ago. I love this stuff!
May 18, 2019
It's a wonderfully descriptive book of the author's globetrotting adventures as an Oxford geologist in pursuit of Cambrian fossils, with great garnishings of his droll humor. Yakurtsk, Russia- Mongolia's Gobi- Bahamas reefs- China- India- Newfoundland, Canada-- he's been to all of them in pursuit of fossils.
September 27, 2025
A very tedious book to confirm (almost) that the "Cambrian Explosion" actually did occur and was not just the effect of earlier creatures having only soft bodies. The perspective and conclusions are interesting, but the author's pretentiously artistic prose was taxing. The book is even littered with "shape poetry!"
December 19, 2019
Unfortunately, the Kindle version has scrambled line drawings and the photos are unclear. This book is more a travelogue of the author's adventures with some history of the geology, rather than a hard science book, but it was entertaining.
August 2, 2024
Read a bit too much like a travelogue. And possibly presented more questions than answers.
July 26, 2018
Brasier's style, juxtaposing the story of discovery with the nature of the same, makes this murky topic lively in Darwin's Lost World. Spun out like a mystery. Spoiler - the worms dunnit.
July 31, 2014
I enjoyed parts of this book quite a bit, though overall it was a slog to get to the end and finally gain the important punch line. Each part of the book is framed through a past trip to some remote geological location that the author took to view obscure but important fossil remains or markings, all in the service of eventually explaining why a lot of single-celled fossils are hard to find in rock beds older than those which were laid down as life was beginning. The reason, and I guess this is a spoiler alert, is that after worms evolved and were constantly churning up sea beds and mud, that fossilization of the smallest creatures became rare indeed. But by following the clues back into older and older sediments, and finally into fine-grained phosphate nodules from about 3 and a half billion years ago, the traces of the earliest single-celled life forms can be found, and even found in the act of reproducing. This book was interesting in the way it traced concepts and disputes through years of geological research, including the political and geographical scientific issues involved, and finally laid out the story from the beginning. A nice summation of a field and a career in some of the most interesting research of the last few decades. Another bonus was learning the correct pronunciation of "Ediacaran".
March 15, 2013
Really enjoyed the mix of Brasier's personal interactions with fossils, his stories of traveling the globe in search of them, and his recounting of what they might mean for the history of life on this planet. His reconstruction of why fossils from the distant past tend to be more gracefully preserved than those that are much newer was fascinating, and something I hadn't been clear on before embarking on this book. Well worth reading if you're interested in the Cambrian and Precambrian, two periods of time that don't get nearly enough attention in books written for the lay audience.
September 15, 2013
A scientific book, albeit a well-written one, and only poolside literature for die hard learners about evolution. Built-up like a whodunnit, but with a weak plot. Good book if you want to learn how to write entertainingly about difficult subjects.
June 10, 2013
Although its a tricky topic it's written to be easily relatable and understandable. Lots of funny comparisons as well.
March 22, 2015
An interesting read, but jumped around a lot.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews