If you have already watched David Attenborough’s Life/Origin of life or Neil deGrasse’s Cosmos docuseries like me, then this book will act as a fantastic recap of the complex history of life on earth. SOUND AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE EAR: The book also looks at the evolution of sound and how animals came to hear.

Life on this planet has continued in much the same way for millennia, adapting to literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter and thriving, from these humblest beginnings to the thrilling and unlikely story of ourselves. Henry Gee’s whistle-stop account of the story of life (and death ― lots of death) on Earth is both fun and informative. Birds are relatives of the dinosaurs and when we want to see dinosaurs nowadays, we can see them in birds. The Earth’s heat, radiating outward from the molten core, keeps the planet forever on the boil, just like a pan of water simmering on a stove. In Dr Gee’s view, watching all life wink out may be like watching a film run in reverse, where complexity declines, and the ability to evolve into new species diminishes until there’s nothing left alive as even the planet itself dies.

This was haphazard at first but gradually became more predictable as a result of the development of an internal chemical template that could be copied and passed down to new generations of membrane-bound bubbles. NOTE: I received a paperback copy of this book from the author in exchange for my honest, unbiased review. In this book, Dr Gee presents an engaging exploration of this enduring ‘where did we come from’ question by combining findings from a variety of scientific disciplines into a coherent story using beautifully evocative and witty prose. Especially the very last page, where the author gives a pretty big nod towards Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker! Less dense materials such as aluminum, silicon, and oxygen combine into a light froth of rocks near the surface.

To be fair, Gee tempers that later, referring to our future as a 'few thousand to tens of thousands of years' and then a little later still as 'sooner or later'. This is a big question that has kept philosophers, thinkers and scientists busy for thousands of years. Gee begins the last chapter of this hugely enjoyable page-turner by modifying a line from Tolstoy: ‘All happy, thriving species are the same.These small, swift creatures with forward-facing eyes, inclined to curiosity and exploration, would eventually give rise to Homo sapiens. You only have to look around you to see how many birds there are as well as things like insects and the one mammal that flies, a bat.

Readers should be chastened at his conclusion, shared by most scientists, that Homo sapiens is making its habitat—the Earth—progressively less habitable and will become extinct in a few thousand years. Slowly, they refined the generation of energy, using it to bud off small bubbles, each encased in its own portion of the parent membrane. billion years ago, even things started to strong together in the trillion to create reef structures visible from space. THE RISE OF DINOSAURS: The book then covers the time between the Triassic, Cretaceous and Jurassic period when dinosaurs became the main form of life on land and they grew to incredible height and length. It's bad enough when publishers add music at chapter breaks, but random music under narration is untenable.BEGINNINGS FORMED IN FIRE AND ICE: If you stretch out your hand from your body and compared your outstretched arm to the history of planet Earth – all you need to do to wipe out the time man has been around in deep history, would require a simple swipe of a nail file across your fingernail – those crumbs that came with that swipe would make up the time man has been around compared to the time Earth has been around.

The bony fish that became the land animals were known as lungfish, and it is for the fact that they had lungs to support movement when the fish gills were dried up and they were not able to breathe on land and not just in the sea, and these would go on becoming the first living animals that would live in land which also includes humans. The membranes made a virtue of their leakiness, using holes as gateways for energy and nutrients and as exit points for wastes.The result was the evolution of a wealth of different kinds of eukaryotes and, over time, the emergence of gatherings of eukaryote cells to make multicellular organisms. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.