Product Description

Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it. What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128377 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
...the most lively book about matters Cambrian and earlier. Martin Braiser has an engaging personality which comes across well in print. (Richard A. Fortey, Times Literary Supplement )

Engaging account. (New Scientist )

If there is one book in this crop that Darwin himself would surely have appreciated, it is 'Darwin's Lost World'. (Clive Cookson, Financial Times )

Customer Reviews

Interesting insight
This is a very interesting book on an issue which has puzzled students of Earth history since at least the time of The Origin of Species in 1859; was the apparent explosion of animal life in the Cambrian period a real event, and if so what was its cause?

This book reads a bit like a scientific whodunit as the possibilities are considered and a suspect - or should I say, an explanation - emerges. The author, Professor of Palaeobiology at Oxford, has obviously been a very active researcher in the Precambrian over the years, and some might object that the descriptions of his expeditions slows in some the ways the discussion of the science. However, it makes one understand how knowledge is gained in the field (in more senses than one), how the theories are grounded, and is an inherent part of the argument.

There are plenty of ideas, and some touch upon fashionable concerns such complex adaptive systems and the ways in which the presence of life can mould the whole physical and chemical constitution of the Earth. These issues are not raised here because they are fashionable but because they may give us some useful insights into the data. The book is a report from a moving front, and so inevitably raises some questions which can't yet be answered. For example, I for one would have like to have some more conclusive information on the nature of the late Precambrian Ediacaran biota, whose members leave no trace of having had a mouth, a gut or bilateral symmetry - but as yet, we don't have it.

In short, this book is a very exciting window into a developing area of science, and into how that science is done. It also beautifully produced by OUP. The only doubt I have is the title. True, the sudden appearance of animal classes in the Cambrian, with little trace of what they had evolved from, was a worry to Darwin, but I suspect that had this not been published in an anniversary year, the great man's name might not have figured so prominently in the title. But, there again, times are hard and we all have livings to make, even academic publishers.