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HORSESHOE CRABS AND VELVET WORMS
By: Richard A. Fortey
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 worldβs 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 lifeβs 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 olderβand odderβthan 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 βliving fossilsβ 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 worldβs old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorerβs sense of adventure and wonder.
 Media BuzzOn Point - May 24, 2012
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