A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Chapters

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As described on the cover, this is a very concise history of the forming of the Earth and the various ages it went through; including the evolution of life and the creatures we now know today (don't worry, the dinosaurs are in here too). The carbon spike we have contributed to, and which causes us so much anxiety, is high, but on a graph showing trends over millennia it will be very narrow, ‘perhaps too narrow to be detectable in the very long term’.

Around 635 million years ago, animal life burst into increased diversity and became even more complex. Another masterful aspect of the structure is the way that the first eight chapters build in a kind of crescendo, then the whole thing widens out with first the development of apes, then hominins, then humans and finally looks forward to the future. We've only been around for 500,000 years or so) and even more of an existential slap in the face is his mater of fact statements that humans will be extinct in a relatively short time by geologic standards (most large animals don't seem to last more than a million years). Against the backdrop of geological time,’ Gee reminds us, ‘the sudden rise of humanity is of negligible significance.

For billions of years, Earth was an inhospitably alien place – covered with churning seas, slowly crafting its landscape through volcanic eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. Mr Gee's text is really a summary that refers the reader onward to a comprehensive Notes section full of suggestions for further reading.

Well, for one, it's truly astounding just how many times the earth has nearly wiped out all life in its existence. Glaciers will grind on and recede, the Sun will grow, and eventually humans will die out sometime before all the carbon dioxide generated by the frantic activity finally seeps away. The atmosphere would have been to us an unbreathable fog of methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and hydrogen. One consequence of the breakup was a series of ice ages that covered the entire globe, the like of which had not been seen since the Great Oxidation Event. Even the earliest examples of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens are found no more than 300,000 or so years ago.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. It doesn't quite top The Accidental Species, but to say it is Gee's second-best book is intended as a high compliment. Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters, by Henry Gee, is an interesting little book on the history of life on Earth. As a senior editor at Nature, Henry Gee has had a front-row seat to the most important fossil discoveries of the last quarter century.

BACKBONE AND MOVING FROM SEA TO LAND: After this, creatures began to form a singular tube which ran from their mouth to their anus – the gut. 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. They spread in sheets over rocks and lawns on the seabed, only to be buried by sand in the next storm: but conquering again and being buried once again, building cushion-like mounds of layered slime and sediment. Definitely check this one out if you were bored with your school textbooks but still wanted to learn about the history of Earth. I read Gee's evolutionary narrative immediately after "Otherlands" by Halliday, and prefer his' over this, if only by nuances.But oxygen is so potent a force that even a trace spelled disaster to life that had evolved in its absence.

Drawing on the very latest scientific understanding and writing in a clear, accessible style, he tells an enlightening tale of survival and persistence that illuminates the delicate balance within which life has always existed. Eventually some of these animals using carbon developed armour, which we can see most notably in trilobites and ammonites later. A high-octane biography of our planet, A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth dishes out interesting nuggets apace while reinvigorating your awe of deep time. Nor had I heard of stromatolites, mounds of slime and sediment that developed early in the history of life on Earth, becoming ‘the most successful and enduring form of life ever to have existed on this planet, the undisputed rulers of the world for three billion years’.Ein Paläontologe wie Gee blickt anders auf Zeiträume als andere Menschen, er denkt in Zeitreihen, die mehrere Millionen Jahre umfassen. This tiny cell extended tendrils toward its neighbors so they could swap genes and materials more easily.