Life on a Young Planet: Review
Andrew H. Knoll's Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth is one of those rare books that can change your, or at any rate, my, picture of reality. I have posted twice before on this book: Eu are Irrelevant and In the Beginning , but the present post is my attempt at a review. Dinosaurs and mastodons don't wander through these pages, unless you count a cameo or two. Their time was still far in the future when the characters whose story is told here held center stage. The Cambrian Period, which started about 543 million years ago, or a bit less than ten thousand times as long ago as our own species originated, ushered in the Paleozoic Era and the first easily recognizable fossils. It was the first age of animals - not the very first animals, but the first animals with considerable size and complexity. All the animal phyla we now recognize were onstage in the Cambrian, as well as numerous phyla dead and gone. Before the Cambrian, only sponges,...