Billions and billions of bad tomorrows The Worst of Times: Paul B. Wignall, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; 2015) ISBN: 9780691142098

نویسنده

  • Pincelli Hull
چکیده

Had Scarlett O’Hara faced life in the aftermath of the Capitanian mass extinction, 260 million years ago, rather than the chaos of life in a war-stricken land, a better tomorrow sure would have been a long time in coming. In The Worst of Times, Paul Wignall marshals the most recent paleontological and geological evidence to argue that life on earth faced its roughest patch yet during a vast eighty million year-long interval spanning from ~260 to ~180 million years ago. Eighty million years is a terrifi cally long time, and at the heart of Wignall’s book is his case for the existence of this prolonged worst of times. To put the enormity of eighty million years into perspective, just consider that eighty million years ago today, dinosaurs were the unquestioned rulers of land. Eighty million years ago, the fi rst primates, horses, and ancient whales still lay more than 25 million years in the distant future. Even a million years is a tremendous amount of evolutionary time. A mere million years ago, giant sloths roamed the Americas, polar bears had yet to evolve, and written history lay roughly 995,000 years (or about ten ice ages) in the future. Even as a paleontologist, the idea of an eighty million year-long worst of times, or billions and billions of bad tomorrows, is staggering and hard to reconcile with our very human experience of time. Wignall builds his case one biotic crisis at a time. Starting with the Capitanian extinction roughly 260 million years ago and ending with the Toarcian extinction roughly 180 million years ago, the 80 million year-interval Book review

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • Current Biology

دوره 25  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2015