By Bruce S. Lieberman
Prehistoric lifestyles is the archive of evolution preserved within the fossil record. This ebook specializes in the that means and value of that archive and is designed for introductory university technological know-how scholars, together with non-science majors, enrolled in survey classes emphasizing paleontology, geology and biology.From the origins of animals to the evolution of rap song, from historic mass extinctions to the present biodiversity predicament, and from the Snowball Earth to offer day weather swap this ebook covers it, with an eye fixed in the direction of exhibiting how earlier existence on the earth places the trendy international into its right context. The heritage of lifestyles and the styles and strategies of evolution are specifically emphasised, as are the interconnections among our planet, its weather method, and its various existence varieties. The ebook doesn't simply describe the background of existence, yet makes use of genuine examples from life’s historical past to demonstrate very important suggestions and theories.
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Additional info for Prehistoric Life: Evolution and the Fossil Record
Sample text
When this happens, biostratinomic processes take over again, even though diagenesis may have begun, and the processes of burial, diagenesis, exhumation, biostratinomy, and reburial can be repeated time and time again. Taphonomy—Implications and Parting Words With this background, let us consider a few examples of the information that is lost due to taphonomy and the information that we can gain from studying it. 6 A distorted trilobite. A Cambrian trilobite from India. Image from N. Hughes, University of California, Riverside.
Coal is made of plant material that has accumulated in a swampy environment where it is protected from destruction by decay; it is not made of minerals. But if coal is not to be regarded as a rock, what could it be? There is a lesson here about humans and our urge to classify things—to tidy up by putting everything into pigeonholes—and nature’s seeming urge to thwart us. One of the worst traps scientists can fall into is to expect their classifications to mirror exactly what nature has done, or for everything nature has done to fit into their scheme of classification.
As a result, it is not unusual to find fossil brachiopod shells that have almost the same chemical composition as that of living brachiopods. When a fossil shell hasn’t been altered it tends to preserve many details. Permineralization Most skeletons are porous to one degree or another. Our bones are quite porous, the pores being occupied by soft tissue, and the shells of many kinds of invertebrates are also porous. When groundwater seeps through porous fossils after their burial, it typically deposits mineral matter into the pores, a process referred to as permineralization.