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A breathtaking adventure
culturelab
A breathtaking adventure Rowan Hooper devours a wildly ambitious guide to all of life
FANCY a bit of time travel from your armchair? Evolution: The whole story is just the job, condensing millions of years of Earth’s history into a highly accessible work. Opening it at random, for example, I found myself in the early Jurassic, 190 million years ago. There stood Dilophosaurus, a feisty-looking theropod dinosaur shown in a colourful, dynamic pose. I skipped forward, again at random, and found myself in 2015, looking at the California condor, a magnificent – and critically endangered – bird. Back in time again, and I ended up in the Cretaceous with Beipiaosaurus, a bizarre, monstrous-looking beast that I learned is the ancestor of predatory raptor dinosaurs and birds. Time to turn the dial way back, to 500 million years ago in the middle Cambrian, where I confronted the infamous Hallucigenia, a spiky, worm-like species that defied classification for years. This is such an attractive and friendly book – reading it is like losing a weekend to a box set of Doctor Who – that it would be easy to glide over its real accomplishment. I cannot think of another book that attempts to catalogue the entire expanse of life and succeeds in such a remarkably palatable way. It manages to delve formidably deep, all the way back to Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, then forward to the For years, the surreal-looking Hallucigenia defied classification 42 | NewScientist | 12 September 2015
origin of life, the first fossils and of scientists and science writers, the explosion of new organisms was edited by zoologist and in the early Cambrian. Mammals prolific author Steve Parker, who and apes are given their proper sticks strictly to established facts due without taking over the book. and consensus interpretations, Each organism is covered across as is right in such a project. For two pages that are full of images, example, at the end, in a chapter graphics and amazing facts, so the on human influence, the authors reader is not overwhelmed by a define the current sixth mass mass of text. The approach extinction as the Holocene breathes life into everything, extinction, using the classical including “boring” stuff (that is, “The approach even non-dinosaur stuff). breathes life into I even warmed to the ginkgo ‘boring’ stuff – that is, tree, an extraordinary plant that non-dinosaur stuff” has been around for 300 million years – in recent times largely thanks to the husbandry of name for the current Buddhist monks. If the immensity epoch, rather than Anthropocene of geological time has started to extinction, a widely used wash over you, this will wake you although still unofficial term. up: the ginkgo has sperm with This strait-laced style and the tails that allow them to move. cover, a serviceable but dull chimp Evolution, compiled by a panel portrait of the sort that readers
will have seen a thousand times before, belies the book’s bright, breezy and modern approach. The sheer ambition of the book – and the strong and immediate sense it conveys of life’s diversity – is impressive, although I did fleetingly fear that I had been landed with a work of creationist madness. The name of Alice Roberts on the cover (as the author of the book’s foreword) reassured me: Roberts is a writer, broadcaster and clinical anatomist. But still I wondered whether Thames & Hudson, a publisher of “whole stories”, including those of photography, architecture, art and cinema, was wise to attempt to account for the entirety of life on Earth. My worries were misplaced. This guide is definitely one for the Tardis library. n
Dorling Kindersley/Getty
Evolution: The whole story, edited by Steve Parker, Thames & Hudson, £19.95
A breathtaking adventure Rowan Hooper devours a wildly ambitious guide to all of life
FANCY a bit of time travel from your armchair? Evolution: The whole story is just the job, condensing millions of years of Earth’s history into a highly accessible work. Opening it at random, for example, I found myself in the early Jurassic, 190 million years ago. There stood Dilophosaurus, a feisty-looking theropod dinosaur shown in a colourful, dynamic pose. I skipped forward, again at random, and found myself in 2015, looking at the California condor, a magnificent – and critically endangered – bird. Back in time again, and I ended up in the Cretaceous with Beipiaosaurus, a bizarre, monstrous-looking beast that I learned is the ancestor of predatory raptor dinosaurs and birds. Time to turn the dial way back, to 500 million years ago in the middle Cambrian, where I confronted the infamous Hallucigenia, a spiky, worm-like species that defied classification for years. This is such an attractive and friendly book – reading it is like losing a weekend to a box set of Doctor Who – that it would be easy to glide over its real accomplishment. I cannot think of another book that attempts to catalogue the entire expanse of life and succeeds in such a remarkably palatable way. It manages to delve formidably deep, all the way back to Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, then forward to the For years, the surreal-looking Hallucigenia defied classification 42 | NewScientist | 12 September 2015
origin of life, the first fossils and of scientists and science writers, the explosion of new organisms was edited by zoologist and in the early Cambrian. Mammals prolific author Steve Parker, who and apes are given their proper sticks strictly to established facts due without taking over the book. and consensus interpretations, Each organism is covered across as is right in such a project. For two pages that are full of images, example, at the end, in a chapter graphics and amazing facts, so the on human influence, the authors reader is not overwhelmed by a define the current sixth mass mass of text. The approach extinction as the Holocene breathes life into everything, extinction, using the classical including “boring” stuff (that is, “The approach even non-dinosaur stuff). breathes life into I even warmed to the ginkgo ‘boring’ stuff – that is, tree, an extraordinary plant that non-dinosaur stuff” has been around for 300 million years – in recent times largely thanks to the husbandry of name for the current Buddhist monks. If the immensity epoch, rather than Anthropocene of geological time has started to extinction, a widely used wash over you, this will wake you although still unofficial term. up: the ginkgo has sperm with This strait-laced style and the tails that allow them to move. cover, a serviceable but dull chimp Evolution, compiled by a panel portrait of the sort that readers
will have seen a thousand times before, belies the book’s bright, breezy and modern approach. The sheer ambition of the book – and the strong and immediate sense it conveys of life’s diversity – is impressive, although I did fleetingly fear that I had been landed with a work of creationist madness. The name of Alice Roberts on the cover (as the author of the book’s foreword) reassured me: Roberts is a writer, broadcaster and clinical anatomist. But still I wondered whether Thames & Hudson, a publisher of “whole stories”, including those of photography, architecture, art and cinema, was wise to attempt to account for the entirety of life on Earth. My worries were misplaced. This guide is definitely one for the Tardis library. n
Dorling Kindersley/Getty
Evolution: The whole story, edited by Steve Parker, Thames & Hudson, £19.95