Stephen Jay Gould
Paperback | Pages: 352 pages Rating: 4.13 | 8780 Users | 238 Reviews
Identify Based On Books Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
| Title | : | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History |
| Author | : | Stephen Jay Gould |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 352 pages |
| Published | : | September 17th 1990 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published October 1st 1989) |
| Categories | : | Science. Nonfiction. Biology. Evolution. History. Natural History. Environment. Nature |
Description Toward Books Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived—a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.Describe Books Concering Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
| Original Title: | Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History |
| ISBN: | 039330700X (ISBN13: 9780393307009) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Royal Society Science Book Prize for General Prize (1991), Pulitzer Prize Nominee for General Nonfiction (1990), Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science (1990) |
Rating Based On Books Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Ratings: 4.13 From 8780 Users | 238 ReviewsPiece Based On Books Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
I purchased this book at Chapter Two Books in Williamstown, MA.I was really looking forward to reading this book because I think this is probably his most well-known popular science book. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I actually like many of his others much better. I found his first few chapters a little dull, but things got exciting once he got to the chapter that he sets up as a play.I'm also not entirely happy with his epilogue. Yes, Pikaia and its proper classification is important. And heexcellent book. the few goodreads reviews saying that the book is "out of date" are by readers who have missed the forest for the trees. it doesn't really matter that uniramia has been replaced by hexapoda + myriapoda or that many of the strange stars of this story have since been demoted from possible new phyla to just stem groups. the two main points still stand; 1.) animals are classified by body plans that are very highly conserved, the burgess shale yielded species that exhibited unusual
I fell in love with dinosaurs when I was 8, about the time I fell in love with horses. My passion for fantasy and science fiction followed later, during my teenage years. I've never gotten over any of them. I'd heard about the paleontological discoveries in the Burgess Shale (in Canadian Rockies), first described in the earky 1900s and then re-analyzed with startlingly different results in the 1970s and 1980s. The Burgess Shale deposits date from the early Cambrian period, roughly 560 million
Stephen Jay Gould performs a really unlikely feat in this book; he makes arthropods as fascinating as dinosaurs! In fact he makes a subject that could be extra-ordinarily dull - the process of taxonomic classification of a bunch of extra-old fossils of small, squidgy animals - into a dramatic and gripping read. THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICYSee the complete review here:http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/33...
Wonderful life, indeed!!One of the best science books I have ever read because the story is so extraordinary. Most of the late Stephen Jay Goulds published works are collections of his essays but this is a full-length book that tells the story of the fossils found in the Burgess Shale in Canada. Normally, when you think of paleontology, you think of dinosaur bones as big as small cars. But this deposit held the fossilized remains of small small-tissued animals that lived 530 million years ago,
The Burgess Shale is a fossil deposit of importance equal to that of the Rift Valley sites of East Africa in that it provides truly pivotal evidence for the story of' life on earth. The shale comes from a small quarry in the Canadian Rockies discovered in the early 20th century by Charles Walcott, then a leading figure at the Smithsonian. The Burgess fossils come from the Middle Cambrian Period, around 350 million years ago. They form one of the earliest assemblages of soft-bodied creatures from
This book was unlike anything else I'd ever read, I suspect because it owes something to the scientific monograph. Maybe? Not having ever read a scientific monograph (they don't even call them that these days), I don't know. Anyway, Gould repeated and repeated and repeated the same conclusions over and over and over and over, until I was ready to embrace the iconographies of the cone of increasing diversity and the ladder of progress just to spite him.Despite that, this was an excellent book.
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