Darwin's Lost World

The hidden history of animal life

Martin Brasier

320 pages | 20 integrated B & W halftones, 8pp colour plate section | 196x129mm

978-0-19-954898-9 | Paperback | 11 March 2010

Price: £8.99 £2.24

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The quest of scientists since Darwin to solve a case he found 'inexplicable' - the lack of fossils in rocks before the Cambrian, over 540 million years old
An account of the earliest known animals - the enigmatic Ediacaran creatures, and the small shelly fossils - that have hardly ever been described before to a lay audience. (Books by Gould and Conway-Morris focus on the more famous, and much later animals of the Burgess Shale)
A personal account of the piecing together of clues about the lead up to the Cambrian from an Oxford scientist involved at the forefront of work on early life
A richly readable and engaging account of the trials and tribulations of expeditions to remote places such as Siberia and Outer Mongolia
Tackles deep and still unresolved questions of evolution: when and how did animals evolve and what drove the great evolutionary innovations of the 'Cambrian Explosion'? These are areas of intense and exciting current research and Brasier here gives his own take on the emerging answers, as one of the leading players in the field

Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it.

What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World.

Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.

Readership: Readers of popular science - particularly those with an interest in earth sciences and the history of life on Earth. Students and researchers in earth sciences, geology, and zoology will also find the book of interest for it provides not only fresh insights into the field, but also stories of adventure too.

Darwin's Lost World

The hidden history of animal life

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