快猫短视频

A SMELL of synthesis is in the air, tinged with a whiff of brimstone. As befits these perilous times, palaeontological minds are concentrating on past catastrophes that have devastated life. The luxury of leafing back through the testimony of the rocks is that we can rejoice in the good news all over again: no matter what has been thrown at it, life has survived. The result is a stimulating crop of books from professorial palaeontologists such as Harvard鈥檚 Andrew Knoll, Bristol鈥檚 Mike Benton and Simon Conway Morris at the University of Cambridge.

The difficult bit of the stories they tell 鈥� and the real interest 鈥� lie in the small print of the fossils, their evolutionary relationships and their distribution through time. Most importantly, it鈥檚 in the interpretation of the data.

The Precambrian lasted a mind-blowing 4 billion years, about 90 per cent of Earth鈥檚 history, yet it鈥檚 still largely a mystery. Knoll is well placed to tell this amazing story, and he does so with verve in Life on a Young Planet, exploring the long 鈥渟low-burning fuse鈥� of those first 3 billion years when life managed to persist despite bombardment from space, widespread volcanism, intense doses of ultraviolet light, runaway glaciation and so on.

As extinctions go, the best known is the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary event 65 million years ago, when flightless creatures such as dinosaurs died out. But as Mike Benton鈥檚 When Life Nearly Died reminds us, by far the biggest mass extinction happened at the end of the Permian 251 million years ago, when 90 per cent of all life perished. Nobody yet knows what happened. Benton expertly reviews the evidence for both students and the general reader. In the race to explain, the front runner remains the outpourings of lava and gas leading to climate change, with gas hydrates coming up fast on the outside lane. Yet everyone still nervously glances skywards: something unexpected from space could pip the favourites at the post.

When it comes to the rise and fall of particular fossil groups, the intriguing extinct flying reptiles are often overlooked. New information, especially from China, has been synthesised by international experts Eric Buffetaut and J. M. Mazin in the Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs. National geological 鈥渂iographies鈥� such as The Geology of Scotland and The Geology of Spain also provide invaluable syntheses. Both include up-to-date reviews of all aspects of the subject, including palaeontology. Both are aimed at students and researchers, but an informed amateur would find them useful, too.

For some years Simon Conway Morris has been setting his cat among the fluffy dinosaurs of science. Among them are the late Stephen Jay Gould and John Maynard Smith, who assert that life鈥檚 trajectory is largely accidental, without meaning or purpose and at the mercy of cosmological happenstance, having been blown off course and set back numerous times.

In Life鈥檚 Solution, Conway Morris takes as his central theme evolutionary convergence and presents a fascinating, densely argued counter to the scientific nihilists. He concludes that 鈥渢he number of evolutionary end points is limited鈥� and 鈥渨hat is possible has usually been arrived at multiple times鈥�, while what was impossible 鈥渂ecomes increasingly inevitable鈥�. According to Conway Morris, progress is simply part of our reality, and 鈥渢he emergence of something like ourselves鈥� is pretty much inevitable.