Prehistoric Life
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Bruce S Lieberman and Roger Kaesler. 2010. Prehistoric Life: Evolution and the Fossil Record. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978 0 6320 4472 6
If there ever was a time when palaeontology was considered an interesting byway then that time has truly gone. The rapid increase in palaentological techniques and understanding in the last 30 years has turned the subject from a peaceful systematics to the depths of current debate surrounding global warming as well as biodiversity and a range of other topics. Here is the dilemma. The tyro needs some guidance in identifying fossils as the first step to using their properties to understand places or events. However, there needs to be some understanding of what this information might be used for after that – how does it fit together? The are many books dealing with the former but far fewer, like this one, dealing with the latter. Come to think of it there are even fewer using the evolution of rap music to explain cladistics!
The text is aimed at the beginner who needs to know what the subject is about and how it fits into our understanding of change in then past. Not unreasonably, we start with the most basic notions of the nature of fossils and how they may be formed. The nest stage in most courses, as here, is to group fossils together in some form of classification. In doing this the authors take a variety of detours so that the reader gets not just the bare introduction but also some of the discussions that surround it. From this, there needs to be some way of connecting these fossils which is generally explained by evolution. Here we get not only the key methods but also the development of ideas and the people surrounding them. We see why rap music is useful in understanding cladistics and why Wallace may have been unwise to give his research to Darwin! These are not trivial points (especially in the case of Wallace) but they do bind the reader more closely to the subject in hand and that is something that we seek increasingly in a world where information is everywhere (but knowledge harder to acquire!). Now that evolution is firmly understood it can be applied to the Fossil Record and used to plot the macroevolution of life i.e. major changes in lifeforms. Of course, change can also mean loss and this means extinction. There’s a discussion of the mass extinctions and the impact of humans but sadly less on the molecular clock and the general run of background extinctions which are used as the base from which current biodiversity loss is measured.A chapter looking at the systematics of paleaontology – grouping into similar forms, finishes this part of the story.
From here, the text takes a different turn and looks at some of the underlying ideas of biology. The first topic dealt with is size. Why are certain animals/plants so large and others, small? What constrains size and how is it affected by by global forces such as plate tectonics? The first question is dealt with by considering physiology but the second has to wait for an intervening chapter on fossil myths (which seems out of place but does add to the general history of the subject). There is another twist in the story now as we move towards palaeoclimates and its impact on lifeforms. Perhaps the best examples in geological time are the Pre-Cambrian development of cellular life and the Cambrian Explosion, that rather mis-named period of rapid evolution (or at least of rapid evolution that remains fossilised!). After these periods, two groups or organisms are discussed – the evolution of reefs (with links to the current biodiversity crisis) and the development of vertebrates. Two small chapters finish the work looking, respectively at extra-terrestrial life and the development of humans, both in fairly general terms.
There is much to like in this text. It has a very lively tone using a range of examples one would not normally expect to find in a geological text. It’s written to appeal to its main audience and it largely succeeds in this. There is a companion website that gives some text figures and information but there are few other references to web-based ideas. Each chapter has a bibliography to help follow up key points. It has a slight bias towards N America but this does not detract overall from the text which more often takes a global perspective. Overall, it’s a great companion to help work through some of the key idea in palaeontology but it does need to be read alongside more conventional texts to get the best use from it.
