A New History of Life

Life is stranger than fiction. Recent investigations hint at episodes in the history of life on Earth that rival the most imaginative movies. For example: Could our planet have been seeded with life from elsewhere? Did the development of life create conditions that threatened to poison the biosphere? How have natural forces conspired, over and over, to remove most traces of life from the planet? And how has life itself responded with determination to survive and thrive in a multitude of astonishing forms?

Topics:
1 The Interconnected Earth
2 The Vast Depths of Earth Time
3 Fossil Clocks
4 Paleontologists as Detectives
5 The Shifting Surface of Planet Earth
6 Earliest Origins—Formation of the Planet
7 Origins of Land, Ocean, and Air
8 The Early Chemical Evolution of Life
9 Hints of the First Life Forms
10 How Life Transformed the Early Earth
11 Snowball Earth—Another Crisis
12 Metazoans—Life Grows Up
13 Incredible Variety—The Cambrian Explosion
14 Window to a Lost World—The Burgess Shale
15 The Forgotten Fossils in Earth’s Story
16 Introduction to the Great Mass Extinctions
17 The Collapse of Earth’s First Eden
18 Making the Break for Land
19 Getting a Backbone—The Story of Vertebrates
20 The Evolution of Jaws
21 These Limbs Were Made for Walking?
22 Tiktaalik—The Search for a Fishapod
23 Carboniferous Giants and Coal
24 Amniotes—The Shape of Things to Come
25 Permian Extinction—Life’s Worst Catastrophe
26 Finding the Killer—The Greenhouse Earth
27 The Dinosaurs Take Over
28 Letting the Dinosaurs Speak—Paleobehavior
29 Conquering the Air—The Evolution of Flight
30 Monsters of the Deep—Mesozoic Oceans
31 The Cretaceous Earth—A Tropical Planet
32 The Sky Is Falling—End of the Dinosaurs
33 The Collision of North and South America
34 The Rise of Mammals and the Last Ice Age
35 The Humble Origins of Human Beings
36 The Conscious Earth