Peter D Ward
Author
Language
English
Description
By looking backward at the course of great extinctions, a paleontologist sees what the future holds.
More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. During the 1990s and the early part of this century, a great battle was fought between those who thought that death...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
n November 12, 2002, Dr. John Chambers of the NASA Ames - search Center gave a seminar to the Astrobiology Group at the OUniversity of Washington. The audience of about 100 listened with rapt attention as Chambers described results from a computer study of how planetary systems form. The goal of his research was to answer a dec- tively simple question: How often would newly forming planetary systems produce Earth-like planets, given a star the size...
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
"In the 1700s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first described epigenetics to explain the inheritance of acquired characteristics; however, his theory was supplanted in the 1800s by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection through heritable genetic mutations. But natural selection could not adequately explain how rapidly species re-diversified and repopulated after mass extinctions. Now advances in the study of DNA and RNA have resurrected epigenetics,...
Author
Publisher
Viking
Pub. Date
2004.
Language
English
Description
The gorgons ruled the land long before there were any dinosaurs, until an environmental cataclysm 250 million years ago annihilated them--along with 90 percent of all plant and animal species on the planet--in an event so terrible even the extinction of the dinosaurs pales in comparison. For more than a decade, Ward and his colleagues have been searching South Africa's Karoo Desert for clues to this world: What were these animals like? How did they...
Author
Publisher
Times Books
Pub. Date
2003.
Language
English
Description
Planet Earth is middle-aged. Science has worked hard to piece together the story of the evolution of our world up to this point, but only recently have we developed the understanding and the tools to describe the entire life cycle of a planet. Ward and Brownlee, a geologist and an astronomer respectively, combine their knowledge of how the critical sustaining systems of our planet evolve through time with their understanding of the life cycles of...
10) Future evolution
Author
Publisher
Times Books
Pub. Date
2001.
Language
English
Description
Describing mass extinction as the primary catalyst for evolutionary change throughout our planet's history, the author argues that we are well into the extinction phase of the Age of Megamammals and that future evolution will be seriously hampered by the lack of species diversity. He also predicts humankind's evolving alongside machines, in company with genetically altered plants that will infest the world as weeds and cloned animal species devoid...
13) A new history of life: the radical new discoveries about the origins and evolution of life on earth
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Press
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"The history of life on Earth is, in some form or another, known to us all-- or so we think. [This book] offers a provocative new account, based on the latest scientific research, of how modern lifeforms evolved"--Amazon.com.
Author
Publisher
Copernicus
Pub. Date
[1997]
Language
English
Description
Discusses the impact of humans on the extinction of animals, focusing particulary on mammoths in the Ice Age, but also including mass extinctions throughout history, such as marsupial lions and giant kangaroos in Australia, the giant moa in New Zealand, and various prehistoric animals in North America, all of which followed the spread of the first humans in those regions.