Life In The Palaeozoic

Explores the evolutionary advances of the Paleozoic period including the development of plants with seeds, shelled eggs, and organisms capable of breathing air.

The culmination of more than fifty years of research by the foremost living expert on plant classification, Diversity and Classification of Flowering Plants is an important contribution to the field of plant taxonomy. In the last decade, the system of classifying plants has been thoroughly revised. Instead of describing every individual family, Takhtajan includes descriptions in keys to families, which he calls "descriptive keys." The advantage of descriptive keys is that they give both the characteristic features of the families and their differences. The delimitation of families and orders drastically differs from the one accepted by the Englerian school and from the one accepted in Arthur Cronquist's system. Takhtajan favors the smaller, more natural families and orders, which are more coherent and better-defined, where characters are easily grasped, and which are more suitable for information retrieval and phylogenetic studies, including cladistic analysis (because it reduces polymorphic codings).

The Early Palaeozoic was a critical interval in the evolution of marine life on our planet. Through a window of some 120 million years, the Cambrian Explosion, Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, End Ordovician Extinction and the subsequent Silurian Recovery established a steep trajectory of increasing marine biodiversity that started in the Late Proterozoic and continued into the Devonian. Biogeography is a key property of virtually all organisms; their distributional ranges, mapped out on a mosaic of changing palaeogeography, have played important roles in modulating the diversity and evolution of marine life. This Memoir first introduces the content, some of the concepts involved in describing and interpreting palaeobiogeography, and the changing Early Palaeozoic geography is illustrated through a series of time slices. The subsequent 26 chapters, compiled by some 130 authors from over 20 countries, describe and analyse distributional and in many cases diversity data for all the major biotic groups plotted on current palaeogeographic maps. Nearly a quarter of a century after the publication of the ‘Green Book’ (Geological Society, London, Memoir12, edited by McKerrow and Scotese), improved stratigraphic and taxonomic data together with more accurate, digitized palaeogeographic maps, have confirmed the central role of palaeobiogeography in understanding the evolution of Early Palaeozoic ecosystems and their biotas.

This is not an imaginary world. This is our continent, North America, over 450 million years ago! Journey into the distant past with When Life Flourished in Ancient Seas: The Early Paleozoic Era. Witness the earliest transformations in what would become North America, when marine life blossomed, and living things first moved onto land. Book jacket.

This series tells the incredible story of our planet, the formation of our continent, and the events and transformations that have brought the diversity of life that we enjoy today. Learn about the creatures that roamed the Earth millions of years ago. These titles, filled with vivid artwork, show readers which types of animals lived in prehistoric times and where.

"In the last twenty years or so there has been an upsurge in the study of Palaeozoic fishes for solving geological problems, both in areas of biostratigraphy and biogeography. This has resulted in an explosion of data, much of it so new that it will take years for all the recent discoveries to be published. This book has resulted to fill the need to provide up-to-date summaries of global work in progress showing the application of both macroscopic and microscopic remains of Palaeozoic vertebrates to geological correlations, and to refinement of global palaeogeographic reconstructions."--from the Preface. This book offers the first detailed treatment of palaeozoic vertebrates for use in correlations and in biogeographic studies. With thirteen chapters of systematic analysis of biostratigraphic and biogeographic data, it includes invaluable summaries of current research as well as new and significant contributions to the fields of geology and evolutionary biology. With charts and figures that show many of the important fossils discussed in the text, as well as stratigraphic, location, and taxonomic indexes, the book will interest palaeontologists, stratigraphers, and other earth scientists concerned with the early history of life on earth.

No book is provoking a more animated discussion among students of the social sciences at the present time than H. G. Wells' Outline of History. The author's task, as he himself sets it, is to tell, "truly and clearly, in one continuous narrative, the whole story of life and mankind so far as it is known today." But while these two volumes are plainly for the general reader rather than for the special student of history, it does not follow that they contain nothing beyond an endless parade of names and dates. Their chief value, indeed, is in the author's interpretation of what he writes about. Events are appraised and men are weighed in the balance as he goes along. Historians in general will not agree with some of these appraisals, nor will they credit Mr. Wells with an approach to infallibility in his judgment of the men who flit across his pages; but his estimates of the relative value of facts and forces can scarcely be brushed aside because they do not command general indorsement. On some matters, unhappily, Mr. Wells has allowed his iconoclastic proclivities to run away with him. Napoleon I, for example, cannot be disposed of as a second-grade "pestilence" because "he killed fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918" (II, p. 384); nor will the world believe, so long as it retains its senses, that Napoleon III was " a much more intelligent man" than his uncle (II, p. 438). Even the pinchbeck himself would have rebuked this insinuation. But when all is said, these two stout volumes embody a remarkable achievement. They contain astonishingly few historical inaccuracies of the customary type. The author's advisers, and a competent galaxy of scholars they are, have kept him clear of the pitfalls. The style is terse and forceful. Mr. Wells certainly has the gift of cogent exposition.