Survivors

Fortey, Richard

£12.99

An awe-inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures that have survived from earlier times.

Available on backorder

Publish Date: 13/09/2012
ISBN: 9780007209873 Category:

Description

An awe-inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures that have survived from earlier times.

In this groundbreaking book, prize-winning science writer Richard Fortey chronicles life’s history not through the fossil record, but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, through geological time.

Fortey takes us on a journey to ancient worlds: on a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance, we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago. Along a stretch of Australian coastline, we bear witness to the sights and sounds that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. And, in the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the secretive velvet worm burrows into the rotting timber of the jungle floor, we marvel at a living fossil which has survived unchanged since before the break-up of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent, over 150 million years ago.

Written with Fortey’s customary sparkle and gusto, this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the world’s oldest flora and fauna brilliantly combines the best science writing about the origins of life with an explorer’s sense of adventure and a poet’s wonder at the natural world.

Additional information

Weight 280 g
Dimensions 198 × 129 × 22 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

336

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

576.8 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K