Download The History of Life: A Very Short Introduction AudioBook Free
This is actually the extraordinary story of the unfolding of life on the planet, informed by Michael J. Benton, a world-renowned authority on biodiversity. Varying over four billion years, Benton weaves along the latest findings on fossils, globe background, evolutionary biology, and many other fields to identify the fantastic leaps that enabled life to evolve from microbe to individuals - big breakthroughs that made totally new ways of life possible - including cell section and multicellularity, hard skeletons, the move to land, the origin of forests, the move to air. He represents the mass extinctions, especially the Permian, which obliterated 90% of life, and he sheds light on the origins of humans, and of the many hominids that travelled before us. He ends by pointing out that learning the past helps us to forecast the near future: what goes on if the atmosphere warms by 5 degrees? What happens if we kill much of the biodiversity on the planet? These exact things have happened before, Benton records. We are in need of only turn to the distant former to know the future of life on the planet.
