Fancy a bit of time travel from your armchair? Evolution: The whole story is just the job, condensing millions of years of Earth's history into a highly accessible work. Opening it at random, for example, I found myself in the early Jurassic, 190 million years ago. There stood Dilophosaurus, a feisty-looking theropod dinosaur shown in a colourful, dynamic pose. I skipped forward, again at random, and found myself in 2015, looking at the California condor, a magnificent - and critically endangered - bird. Back in time again, and I ended up in the Cretaceous with Beipiaosaurus, a bizarre, monstrous-looking beast that I learned is the ancestor of predatory raptor dinosaurs and birds. Time to turn the dial way back, to 500 million years ago in the middle Cambrian, where I confronted the infamous Hallucigenia, a spiky, worm-like species that defied classification for years.
展开▼
