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The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind
Knopf
April 2012
On Sale: April 10, 2012
332 pages
ISBN: 0307263614
EAN: 9780307263612
Kindle: B005O1BMH0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the
acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History
of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry
Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s
history told not through the fossil record but through the
stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged,
throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely
obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have
evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and
odder—than many of us realize.
Scattered
across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals
continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a
moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab
shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did
450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New
Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has
burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup
of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian
coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to
the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors
offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in
evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but
rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone.
Written in buoyant, sparkling prose,
Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously
captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining
the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of
adventure and wonder.
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