The Cambrian Explosion
Subtitle: the construction of animal biodiversity
Publisher: Roberts and Company; Roberts and Company Publishers
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Greenwood Village, CO
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 416
ISBN-13: 9781936221035
Description: "The Cambrian Period records one of the most extraordinary transitions in the history of life. Although animals may have first appeared nearly 700 million years ago, with the earliest sponges, their initial diversifications appear to have been modest until a richly diverse fossil fauna appeared relatively abruptly about 170 million years later. In The Cambrian Explosion, Erwin and Valentine synthesize research from many fields to explain why there was such remarkable novelty of animal forms"--
Table of contents: title: The geological context of Ediacaran and Cambrian events; title: The environmental context of the Ediacaran and early Cambrian; title: The Metazoan tree of life; title: Dawn of animals : the Ediacara biota; title: Metazoan architectures of the Cambrian explosion; title: The origin and evolution of Metazoan ecosystems; title: The evolution of the Metazoan genome an dthe Cambrian explosion; title: Ghostly ancestors; title: Constructing the Cambrian