O nce upon a time…’ The opening words of Henry Gee’s new book give notice that what follows will be a story – and a dazzling, beguiling story it is, told at an exhilarating pace.

one of these planets, known as Theia, a planet about the same size as today’s Mars, which, when it struck earth, with a glancing blow and disintegrated, the collision blasted much of the earth’s surface into space, and some of this formed our moon”. At the same time, gases such as methane and carbon dioxide were scrubbed from the air, absorbed by the abundance of newly formed rock. It does as well as it is possible to do in terms of making somewhat comprehensible the enormous span of that time. In Dr Gee’s view, watching all life wink out may be like watching a film run in reverse, where complexity declines, and the ability to evolve into new species diminishes until there’s nothing left alive as even the planet itself dies. The pursuit of nutrients, and the need to survive both the harsh radiation from the sun, and the changing climate of the Earth, led to numerous innovations for protection, efficient use and storage of energy, and reproduction, amongst other needs.There then became a very long ice age which created glaciers and salt water out of the sea and onto the land and made more landmass which then allowed more animals to start becoming land creatures. Die Karriere aller Lebewesen ende mit dem Aussterben, zitiert Gee in seinem Nachwort den britischen Politiker Enoch Powell. Even better, it goes beyond the natural human inclination to see ourselves as special and puts us in our proper place in the cosmic scheme of things. For the first time, they ventured away from the sea and colonized freshwater ponds and streams inland. A Tyrannosaurus rex would’ve had teeth the size of the banana and as if they were made from steel, but they were also dinosaurs that could walk upon the palm of your hand and we’re no bigger than the size of a crow.

As cells evolved into more complex lifeforms, the earliest known signs of multicellular life forms are around 2,100 million years ago. I must admit I had never heard of the Lystrosaurus, an animal with ‘the body of a pig, the uncompromising attitude towards food of a golden retriever, and the head of an electric can opener’ – and yet, for millions of years after the End-Permian mass extinction (yes, another one), nine out of every ten animals on Earth was a Lystrosaurus. The result was the evolution of a wealth of different kinds of eukaryotes and, over time, the emergence of gatherings of eukaryote cells to make multicellular organisms. This book is like a summary of Campbell biology with a lot of lengthy walls of texts, namedrops, and NO illustrations. Our cousins in the animal kingdom are long gone, from human predation, possibly, but much more likely from their inability to survive a changing climate.Every time majority of flora and fauna gets wiped out (Five mass extinctions), life always reappeared and took a different direction in the evolutionary path. There are bacteria that thrive on crude oil, on solvents that cause cancer in humans, or even in nuclear waste. The core is kept hot by gravity and the decay of heavy radioactive elements such as uranium, forged in the final moments of the ancient supernova. HUMANS: the story of Homo sapiens, is it for more than a quarter of 1 million years of failure, and at the first 98% of our existence, the tale of Homo sapiens, as one of heart-breaking tragedy, had any of the participants survived to tell the tale. However, what is also remarkable is that many animals and birds that could fly, as soon as they found an island where there were no predators and they were safe they lost the ability to fly.

This will be our greatest challenge, and one we may not be able to survive at all, if the history of life on Earth has any bearing on it. Mr Gee's text is really a summary that refers the reader onward to a comprehensive Notes section full of suggestions for further reading. Das liegt nicht nur allein an den Zerstörungen, die die Menschen gerade in den letzten Jahren und Jahrzehnten angerichtet haben, sondern in der Natur des Planeten und des Universums. billion years ago, living things had started to throng together in their trillions to create reefs—structures visible from space. The day came when the Earth had cooled enough for the water vapor in the atmosphere to condense and fall as rain.To the earliest life, which had evolved in an ocean and beneath an atmosphere essentially without free oxygen, it spelled environmental catastrophe.