A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

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These mound-shaped masses, known as stromatolites, were to become the most successful and enduring form of life ever to have existed on this planet, the undisputed rulers of the world for 3 billion years. With authority, humor, and detail, Gee, a paleontologist and senior editor of Nature, traces the progression of life on earth from its initial stirrings. There are bacteria that thrive on crude oil, on solvents that cause cancer in humans, or even in nuclear waste.

This is now the best book available about the huge changes in our planet and its living creatures, over the billions of years of the Earth’s existence. THE RISE OF MAMMALS AND HUMANS: And then finally about 7 million years ago they began to exist upright humanoids which we know there have been at least eight and probably more, animals that could walk upright and appear similar to humans and apes. To set the matter into perspective, however, when cyanobacteria were making their first essays into oxygenic photosynthesis—3 billion years ago or more—there was rarely enough free oxygen at any time to count as more than a minor trace pollutant. There was always an explanation to help the layman to understand subjects they might not have encountered. They formed when the rising currents became turbulent and diverted into eddies and, losing energy, dumped their cargo of mineral-rich debris4 into gaps and pores in the rock.Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an alluring, up-close intimacy. Dass Leben trotzdem entsteht und immer wieder entstanden ist, von winzigen Organismen bis hin zu hochkomplexen Arten, zeigt Gee in diesem Buch, dem die Faszination anzumerken ist, die auch der Autor angesichts der Vielfalt des Lebens lange vor unseer Zeit spürt. Like Neils Bohr and others, I believe that prediction is difficult, especially about the future, and I prefer the less definitive figure. Stromatolites—as we have seen, the first visible signs of life on Earth—were colonies of different kinds of bacteria. Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an up-close intimacy.

Besides, taking the long view, ‘life on Earth, with all its drama, all its comings and goings, is governed by just two things. From the jawbone that was attached to the jaw of the fish, small bones slowly evolved into the bones that would make up the inner ear, so we could detect the movement of molecules in the air and make sense of sound. All the animals which ever existed for 150 million years in the time of the dinosaur, there were a few small creatures underground did eventually become a new form of animal that could feed on grass, and this contains silica which often required teeth cells to grind it down. And yet,’ observes Gee calmly, ‘the Great Oxidation Event and subsequent “Snowball Earth” episode were the kinds of apocalyptic disasters in which life on Earth has always thrived. It was the tendency of bacteria to form communities of different species that led to the next great evolutionary innovation.It began with small spores of microorganisms, moving onto land on occasion and slowly around the Devonian period they began to disrupt the sand and began to grow roots and nutrients and turn the sand into soil. in chapter 3 for example, author uses a tons of extinct species to tell facts of evolutionary history, it becomes difficult to imagine them in a sentence of information, most of them you might have never heard of them. The way the book is formatted you move forward through time with the Earth as it starts out in the earliest and then move forward.