"There are few stories more remarkable than the evolution of life on earth. Where did humans come from? Where did life come from? New fields of study, such as molecular biology and astrobiology, are shedding remarkable new light on the origin of life and the origin of sex.
In this Very Short Introduction Michael J. Benton covers all the main fossil groups, including dinosaurs, and the upheavals such as mass extinctions that have beset our planet and life on Earth. Benton highlights the key episodes in the evolution of life from its origin over some four billion years, to the ten million or more species today. The book ends with a consideration of humans themselves, with our ability to modify the Earth in ways that no other species has ever done, and the consequences of that power."
"Here is the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on Earth, told by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Ranging over four billion years, Benton weaves together the latest findings on fossils, earth history, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to highlight the great leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to human—big breakthroughs that made whole new ways of life possible—including cell division and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to the air. He describes the mass extinctions, especially the Permian, which obliterated 90% of life, and he sheds light on the origins of human beings, and of the many hominids that went before us. He ends by pointing out that studying the past helps us to predict the future: what happens if the atmosphere warms by five degrees? What happens if we destroy much of the biodiversity on Earth? These things have happened before, Benton notes. We need only look to the distant past to know the future of life on Earth."
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