Life on Earth: The Greatest Story Ever Told

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By the time he reaches the Colorado River bed, the geological strata are 2,000 million years old—yet there are no fossils. Attenborough’s perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today. Coral reefs contain the greatest variety of species, many of which are conspicuously coloured to ward off predators or attract mates. Since this is an exceptional fate for most of them, we are never likely to know from fossil evidence anything approaching the complete range of land-living animals and plants that has existed in the past. These developed into trilobites and crustaceans, and the horseshoe crab is shown nesting in vast numbers on Delaware Bay.

In this new edition, the author, with the help of zoologist Matthew Cobb, has added all the most up-to-date discoveries of ecology and biology, as well as a full-colour 64-page photography section. The boa, puff adder and sidewinder demonstrate methods of locomotion, the egg-eating snake has an extreme example of a hinged jaw, and the lethal diamondback rattlesnake is described as the most efficient at despatching its prey. These represent times when the land rose, the seas drained away and the seabed became dry so that the deposits that had accumulated on it were eroded away.By the end of this book it is difficult to say which is the more astonishing – the ingenuity with which individual species contrive a living, or the complexity of their interdependence on each other and on the habitations provided by our planet.

Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet.It was a revelation of the splendour and fecundity of the natural world from which I have never recovered. The dinosaurs' growth was limited by the strength of their bones but the whales only rely on water to support their weight, and so have been able to grow into the world's largest animals. So those best fitted to their surroundings will be selected and be able to transmit their characteristics to their offspring. Darwin demonstrated that the driving force of evolution comes from the accumulation, over countless generations, of chance genetic changes sifted by the rigours of natural selection.

Life’s evolutionary steps – from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight – are conveyed with an up-close intimacy. So if the proportion of the secondary element to the primary one in a rock is measured, the time at which the original mineral was formed can be calculated. So it seems really very unfair that man should have chosen the gorilla to symbolise everything that is aggressive and violent, when that is the one thing that the gorilla is not—and that we are. Fossils have been found not only in Australia but in many other parts of the world, including the Avalon peninsula in northern Canada where a seabed thronged with all kinds of hitherto unknown organisms and dating from around 565 million years ago has been preserved with astounding perfection. Large format paperback(small crease,nick and scratch on the edges of the cover and spine) in near fine condition.He has close connections with the University of Cambridge and the Museum of Zoology, and in June 2018 officially reopened the museum's wonderful new gallery spaces after a major refurbishment. Attenborough hails the tern as one of the most graceful flyers and the albatross as a skilled glider. The dark fine-grained rocks lie not in horizontal layers like all those above, but are twisted and buckled and riven with veins of pink granite. Are signs of life absent because these rocks and the limestones directly above are so extremely ancient that all such traces have been crushed from them? I intend no minimisation of the debt owed to them by all of us who take pleasure in watching and thinking about animals.