Horseshoe Crabs And Velvet Worms

Author : Richard Fortey
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307957411
Total Pages : 483 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms written by Richard Fortey and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the world’s leading natural scientists and the acclaimed author of Trilobite!, Life: A Natural History of Four Billion Years of Life on Earth and Dry Storeroom No. 1 comes a fascinating chronicle of life’s history told not through the fossil record but through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize. Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone. Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.

Author : Anthony D. Fredericks
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780983011187
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Horseshoe Crab written by Anthony D. Fredericks and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling from the Delaware Bay to the Florida Panhandle, this examination is a quest through the natural history and science behind one of nature's oldest and oddest survivors--the horseshoe crab. With ten eyes, five pairs of walking legs, a heart half the length of their bodies, and blood that can save a person's life, horseshoe crabs have been on this planet for 445 million years--since long before the dinosaurs arrived. This book explores their unique biology and sex life, explains their importance to medical science and migratory shorebirds, and introduces readers to the people who are working to study and protect them.

Author : Richard Fortey
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
ISBN 13 : 000744138X
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind (Text Only) written by Richard Fortey and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ebook edition does not include illustrations. An awe-inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe, in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures which have survived from earlier times and whose stories speak to us of seminal events in the history of life.

Author : Richard Fortey
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307434672
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trilobite written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Trilobite, Richard Fortey, paleontologist and author of the acclaimed Life, offers a marvelously written, smart and compelling, accessible and witty scientific narrative of the most ubiquitous of fossil creatures. Trilobites were shelled animals that lived in the oceans over five hundred million years ago. As bewilderingly diverse then as the beetle is today, they survived in the arctic or the tropics, were spiky or smooth, were large as lobsters or small as fleas. And because they flourished for three hundred million years, they can be used to glimpse a less evolved world of ancient continents and vanished oceans. Erudite and entertaining, this book is a uniquely exuberant homage to a fabulously singular species.

Author : William Sargent
Publisher : University Press of New England
ISBN 13 : 1611687160
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crab Wars written by William Sargent and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surviving almost unmolested for 300 million years, the horseshoe crab is now the object of an intense legal and ethical struggle involving marine biologists, environmentalists, US government officials, biotechnologists, and international corporations. The source of this friction is the discovery 25 years ago that the blood of these ancient creatures serves as the basis for the most reliable test for the deadly and ubiquitous gram-negative bacteria. These bacteria are responsible for life-threatening diseases like menengitis, typhoid, E. coli, Legionnaire's Disease and toxic shock syndrome. Because every drug certified by the FDA must be tested using the horseshoe crab derivative known as Limulus lysate, a multimillion dollar industry has emerged involving the license to "bleed" horseshoe crabs and the rights to their breeding grounds. Since his youthful fascination with these ancient creatures, William Sargent has spent much of his life observing, studying, and collecting horseshoe crabs. As a result, he presents a thoroughly accessible insider's guide to the discovery of the lysate test, the exploitation of the crabs at the hands of multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates, local fishing interests, and the legal and governmental wrangling over the creatures' ultimate fate. In the end, the story of the horseshoe crab is a sobering reflection on the unintended consequences of scientific progress and the danger of self-regulated industries controlling a limited natural resource.

Author : Richard Fortey
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307761185
Total Pages : 566 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life written by Richard Fortey and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By one of Britain's most gifted scientists: a magnificently daring and compulsively readable account of life on Earth (from the "big bang" to the advent of man), based entirely on the most original of all sources--the evidence of fossils. With excitement and driving intelligence, Richard Fortey guides us from the barren globe spinning in space, through the very earliest signs of life in the sulphurous hot springs and volcanic vents of the young planet, the appearance of cells, the slow creation of an atmosphere and the evolution of myriad forms of plants and animals that could then be sustained, including the magnificent era of the dinosaurs, and on to the last moment before the debut of Homo sapiens. Ranging across multiple scientific disciplines, explicating in wonderfully clear and refreshing prose their findings and arguments--about the origins of life, the causes of species extinctions and the first appearance of man--Fortey weaves this history out of the most delicate traceries left in rock, stone and earth. He also explains how, on each aspect of nature and life, scientists have reached the understanding we have today, who made the key discoveries, who their opponents were and why certain ideas won. Brimful of wit, fascinating personal experience and high scholarship, this book may well be our best introduction yet to the complex history of life on Earth. A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection With 32 pages of photographs

Author : Richard A. Fortey
Publisher : Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 9780307263612
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms written by Richard A. Fortey and published by Alfred a Knopf Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a narrative tour of what living creatures reveal about the history of evolution, demonstrating how various organisms and ecosystems that survive from earlier periods reflect seminal events.

Author : Richard A. Fortey
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life written by Richard A. Fortey and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book guides the reader through space, through the earliest signs of life on the rims of volcanoes, the creation of an atmosphere and the myriad forms of planets and animals which could then evolve and be sustained

Author : Samuel Arbesman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 159184651X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Half-Life of Facts written by Samuel Arbesman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New insights from the science of science Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. Samuel Arbesman shows us how knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and how this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. He takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries.

Author : Peter Crane
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300190476
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ginkgo written by Peter Crane and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVPerhaps the world’s most distinctive tree, ginkgo has remained stubbornly unchanged for more than two hundred million years. A living link to the age of dinosaurs, it survived the great ice ages as a relic in China, but it earned its reprieve when people first found it useful about a thousand years ago. Today ginkgo is beloved for the elegance of its leaves, prized for its edible nuts, and revered for its longevity. This engaging book tells the full and fascinating story of a tree that people saved from extinction—a story that offers hope for other botanical biographies that are still being written./divDIV /divDIVInspired by the historic ginkgo that has thrived in London’s Kew Gardens since the 1760s, renowned botanist Peter Crane explores the evolutionary history of the species from its mysterious origin through its proliferation, drastic decline, and ultimate resurgence. Crane also highlights the cultural and social significance of the ginkgo: its medicinal and nutritional uses, its power as a source of artistic and religious inspiration, and its importance as one of the world’s most popular street trees. Readers of this extraordinarily interesting book will be drawn to the nearest ginkgo, where they can experience firsthand the timeless beauty of the oldest tree on Earth./div