A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters

by Andrew H. Knoll

(that’s what all those Glossopteris leaf fossils were trying to tell us),

This is an example of the kind of language I was rolling my eyes at when reading this book. Fossils are not "trying to tell us" anything! What a weird anthropomorphism.

A famous Borscht Belt joke holds that life begins when the dog dies and the kids go to college, but if we take the question seriously, what is it, really, that differentiates us—and dogs and oak trees and bacteria—from mountains and valleys, volcanoes and minerals?

Is this joke famous? Even aside from that, the tonal whiplash in this sentence is astonishing.

Rocks of this age from Australia, China, Montana, and Siberia

Maybe this is just me, but I also don't like when lists of locations don't match in their level. We have here a country, a country, a state, and a region. It feels sloppy.

Even today, the biosphere has 30 tons of bacteria and archaea for every ton of animal.

This is incredible! I had no idea...

Cod populations that yielded more than 800,000 tons of catch in 1958 were declared commercially extinct in 1992, altering the very cultural fabric of adjacent Newfoundland. Commercial fishing was banned, but nearly three decades later, the cod have yet to recover.

This is a horrifying statistic. This whole last chapter in general seemed better written. It's clearly the reason he wrote this book.