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Prehistoric Life: Evolution and the Fossil Record
Prehistoric life is the archive of evolution preserved in the fossil record. This book focuses on the meaning and significance of that archive and is designed for introductory college science students, including non-science majors, enrolled in survey courses emphasizing paleontology, geology and biology.
From the origins of animals to the evolution of rap music, from ancient mass extinctions to the current biodiversity crisis, and from the Snowball Earth to present day climate change this book covers it, with an eye towards showing how past life on Earth puts the modern world into its proper context. The history of life and the patterns and processes of evolution are especially emphasized, as are the interconnections between our planet, its climate system, and its varied life forms. The book does not just describe the history of life, but uses actual examples from life’s history to illustrate important concepts and theories.
From the origins of animals to the evolution of rap music, from ancient mass extinctions to the current biodiversity crisis, and from the Snowball Earth to present day climate change this book covers it, with an eye towards showing how past life on Earth puts the modern world into its proper context. The history of life and the patterns and processes of evolution are especially emphasized, as are the interconnections between our planet, its climate system, and its varied life forms. The book does not just describe the history of life, but uses actual examples from life’s history to illustrate important concepts and theories.
400 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2010
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December 20, 2025
I’m reading at least one thousand books of history in chronological order, going from the big bang through human civilization to the end of the world, and this is book #15 in that series. I just read four books about the nature of evolution, how it works at the global, individual, and genetic level (answer: pretty crazy!), and now I’m doing another four books about Paleozoic life, the really old stuff. Then I’ll read two books on mass extinctions in general before getting into individual branches of life like plants and insects. I'm starting ancient life with this book because it’s really a true paleontology textbook, talking about terminology and techniques, and giving a general overview of the basic principles of evolution, fossils, and how—out in the field—we learn about ancient life.
True to its subtitle, this book begins with a few chapters giving an overview on the nature of fossils themselves, what the different types are—e.g. trace fossils, coprolite, etc.—how they form, and how paleontologists date them and gain information from them. There are then a few chapters dedicated to evolution and extinction, the two sides of the coin when it comes to the history of life on earth. As far as evolution goes, the authors take great pains to debunk at least two common misperceptions: the first is that evolution is a continual and gradual process. This is sometimes true, but a much more common occurrence is for a genus or species to be largely stable for long periods of time, and then there are rapid transformations over a relatively short period. This could be due to a mass extinction event or something lower key like the geographical isolation of a community of organisms, caused by, say, geological activity or migration; evolution occurs more rapidly within a small geographically isolated group than in one that's widespread or global, because the wider-spread species are less subject to changes in local conditions.
The second bit of myth busting the authors do here regards the survival of the fittest. Again, while some species evolve traits that give them an advantage over their competitors in the current conditions, these quick bursts of evolutionary change are largely the result of luck and chance, as my previous book A Series of Fortunate Events explains in detail, which also means that you can't really take a snapshot of life at any one point in earth's history and predict which lifeforms will have the most successful descendants. Non-avian dinosaurs were incredibly successful in the late Cretaceous period, for example, but the complete chance of the meteorite strike was nothing that they could have prepared for. And again, A Series of Fortunate Events describes how the meteorite had a thirty-minute window in which it could have done that much damage—some extreme bad luck for the dinos. But for others it was a jackpot: the birds and mammals that had been largely outcompeted by the dinosaurs hit an evolutionary lottery when they were able to better survive that mass extinction event and move to fill the now vacant ecosystems, resulting in, you guessed it, a quick radiation of biological diversity.
The book discusses some other interesting parameters for life, like Galileo's principle, which limits the size that things, including organisms, can grow to while still, in organisms' case, getting energy to all the parts of their bodies. (A single cell can only grow so big because it's limited by its surface area-to-volume ratio, while multicellular organisms have managed this by creating internal systems like circulation and digestion; think of the famously huge area of a human intestine—we really pack it in there!) There are also some interesting but largely unrelated chapters, like how ancient people in Greece and elsewhere interpreted fossils, giving rise to mythical creatures like centaurs and cyclopses, as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life and mankind's prospects in the face of global warming and the sixth mass extinction. So I was a little unclear on the organizing principles of all the chapters, but this is still a really informative book, on everything from the Cambrian radiation to a case study on the history of reefs over time and how they've faired through their previous two mass extinctions (it's a different kind of animal that builds reefs each time—it just happens to be coral in the present—but reefs look like a common feature of marine life...although they do take several million years to re-evolve once they're wiped out). So I recommend this to anyone interested in the macro-level mechanisms of evolution, and then I'd probably pair it with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or The Extended Phenotype to see how evolution works at the genetic level.
The previous title in my series of 1,000 history books—going chronologically from dinosaurs to pyramids to knights to spaceships, with lots of other stuff in there too—is Sean B. Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, and the next one is Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth by David Burnie. You can also start at the beginning with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or see the complete list here.
True to its subtitle, this book begins with a few chapters giving an overview on the nature of fossils themselves, what the different types are—e.g. trace fossils, coprolite, etc.—how they form, and how paleontologists date them and gain information from them. There are then a few chapters dedicated to evolution and extinction, the two sides of the coin when it comes to the history of life on earth. As far as evolution goes, the authors take great pains to debunk at least two common misperceptions: the first is that evolution is a continual and gradual process. This is sometimes true, but a much more common occurrence is for a genus or species to be largely stable for long periods of time, and then there are rapid transformations over a relatively short period. This could be due to a mass extinction event or something lower key like the geographical isolation of a community of organisms, caused by, say, geological activity or migration; evolution occurs more rapidly within a small geographically isolated group than in one that's widespread or global, because the wider-spread species are less subject to changes in local conditions.
The second bit of myth busting the authors do here regards the survival of the fittest. Again, while some species evolve traits that give them an advantage over their competitors in the current conditions, these quick bursts of evolutionary change are largely the result of luck and chance, as my previous book A Series of Fortunate Events explains in detail, which also means that you can't really take a snapshot of life at any one point in earth's history and predict which lifeforms will have the most successful descendants. Non-avian dinosaurs were incredibly successful in the late Cretaceous period, for example, but the complete chance of the meteorite strike was nothing that they could have prepared for. And again, A Series of Fortunate Events describes how the meteorite had a thirty-minute window in which it could have done that much damage—some extreme bad luck for the dinos. But for others it was a jackpot: the birds and mammals that had been largely outcompeted by the dinosaurs hit an evolutionary lottery when they were able to better survive that mass extinction event and move to fill the now vacant ecosystems, resulting in, you guessed it, a quick radiation of biological diversity.
The book discusses some other interesting parameters for life, like Galileo's principle, which limits the size that things, including organisms, can grow to while still, in organisms' case, getting energy to all the parts of their bodies. (A single cell can only grow so big because it's limited by its surface area-to-volume ratio, while multicellular organisms have managed this by creating internal systems like circulation and digestion; think of the famously huge area of a human intestine—we really pack it in there!) There are also some interesting but largely unrelated chapters, like how ancient people in Greece and elsewhere interpreted fossils, giving rise to mythical creatures like centaurs and cyclopses, as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life and mankind's prospects in the face of global warming and the sixth mass extinction. So I was a little unclear on the organizing principles of all the chapters, but this is still a really informative book, on everything from the Cambrian radiation to a case study on the history of reefs over time and how they've faired through their previous two mass extinctions (it's a different kind of animal that builds reefs each time—it just happens to be coral in the present—but reefs look like a common feature of marine life...although they do take several million years to re-evolve once they're wiped out). So I recommend this to anyone interested in the macro-level mechanisms of evolution, and then I'd probably pair it with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene or The Extended Phenotype to see how evolution works at the genetic level.
The previous title in my series of 1,000 history books—going chronologically from dinosaurs to pyramids to knights to spaceships, with lots of other stuff in there too—is Sean B. Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, and the next one is Prehistoric Life: The Definitive Visual History of Life on Earth by David Burnie. You can also start at the beginning with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time or see the complete list here.
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May 27, 2017هذا الكتاب يشرح علم الحفريات و التحديات التي تواجه نظريه التطور من حيث اثباتها بالحفريات - فهو يتكلم عن انواع الحفريات و الظروف اللازمه لتكونها و كيفيه تأريخها و ما هي الحقبات الجيولوجيه المعروفه ٠و ايضا ما هو السجل الاحفوري و كيف يتكون
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