Cambrian Ocean World: Ancient Sea Life Of North America (Life Of The Past)

This volume, aimed at the general reader, presents the story of the Cambrian Period and of its amazing variety of animals. The Cambrian was a critical time in Earth's history during which nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than two million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian "explosion" is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. They tell the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet's long history. 9780253011824 0253011825 416 BOOK Nature NOT_MATURE http://books.google.com/books/content?id=KaijmwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=5&source=gbs_api en

• | Author: John Russell Foster
• | Publisher: Indiana University Press
• | Publication Date: Jun 06, 2014
• | Number of Pages: 416 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0253011825
• | ISBN-13: 9780253011824