Early Life (The Prehistoric Earth)

For a scientific book, it is certainly easy to read. Many times, books that cover early Earth biology are written by scientists, who are certainly knowledgeable but are not always the most coherent "writers". The language used is somewhere between a text book and a magazine article that would be written on the subject. My gripes would be the length that the writer spent on biology and evolution. Since 3/4 of the book is allocated to scientific classifications and the history of evolution as a science, only a quarter of the book is left to the Cambrian Period. I also noticed there were no mention of graptolites in the book.....a very important species in terms of Cambrian fossil dating.

This early portion of this book discusses what fossils typically are, the movement of tectonic plates, what eons, eras and periods are, that organisms have gone extinct in the past, touches on some early geologists such as Werner, Hutton, Milne, Gutenberg and so on. The author actually does a pretty nice job of all this, at a very introductory level, - but - all that material would be far better placed into a book called “A Basic Introduction to Paleontology”. I purchased this book hoping for a review of the Cambrian Period. Notice the title does say “Early Life The Cambrian Period”. Yet the book is 224 pages long and the discussion of the Cambrian Period starts on page 160. Even once we FINALLY get to the supposed topic, the information is very superficial. For example, is there any discussion of the Cambrian’s eons? Nope. And so it goes. I was disappointed.