Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth

Author: Keith Stewart Thomson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245357
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
"An engrossing tale of obsession, adventure and scientific reasoning." —Betty Ann Kevles, Los Angeles Times In the winter of 1938, a fishing boat by chance dragged from the Indian Ocean a fish thought extinct for 70 million years. It was a coelacanth, which thrived concurrently with dinosaurs and pterodactyls—an animal of major importance to those who study the history of vertebrate life. Living Fossil describes the life and habitat of the coelcanth and what scientists have learned about it during fifty years of research. It is an exciting and very human story, filled with ambitious and brilliant people, that reveals much about the practice of modern science.

Living Fossils

Author: N. Eldredge
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461382718
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 445

Book Description
The case history approach has an impressive record of success in a variety of disciplines. Collections of case histories, casebooks, are now widely used in all sorts of specialties other than in their familiar appli cation to law and medicine. The case method had its formal beginning at Harvard in 1871 when Christopher Lagdell developed it as a means of teaching. It was so successful in teaching law that it was soon adopted in medical education, and the collection of cases provided the raw material for research on various diseases. Subsequently, the case history approach spread to such varied fields as business, psychology, management, and economics, and there are over 100 books in print that use this approach. The idea for a series of Casehooks in Earth Science grew from my experience in organizing and editing a collection of examples of one variety of sedimentary deposits. The prqject began as an effort to bring some order to a large number of descriptions of these deposits that were so varied in presentation and terminology that even specialists found them difficult to compare and analyze. Thus, from the beginning, it was evident that something more than a simple collection of papers was needed. Accordingly, the nearly fifty contributors worked together with George de Vries Klein and me to establish a standard format for presenting the case histories.

Living Fossils

Author: Rebecca E. Hirsch
Publisher: Millbrook Press
ISBN: 1728411343
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Book Description
In the history of life on this planet, 99.9 percent of all species have gone extinct. But a few have survived almost unchanged. Author Rebecca E. Hirsch introduces readers to six living fossils, including the chambered nautilus, the horseshoe crab with its sticky blue blood, and venomous platypuses that sting, as well as a comprehensive explanation of evolution and extinction for readers who may not be familiar with the terms yet. Readers will also discover a a spectacular timeline of the history of animal life on Earth. Dive into the stories of these incredible animals and find out how they help scientists piece together evolutionary history.

Nautilus

Author: W. Bruce Saunders
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048132991
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Book Description
1. 1 Nautilus and Allonautilus: Two Decades of Progress W. Bruce Saunders Department of Geology Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr PA 19010 wsaunder@brynmawr. edu Neil H. Landman Division of Paleontology American Museum of Natural History New York, New York 10024 landman@amnh. org When Nautilus: Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil was published in 1987, it marked a milestone in cross-disciplinary collaboration. More than half of the contributing authors (36/65) were paleontologists, many of whom were collaborating with neontological counterparts. Their interest in studying this reclusive, poorly known animal was being driven by a search for clues to the mode of life and natural history of the once dominant shelled cephalopods, through study of the sole surviving genus. At the same time, Nautilus offered an opportunity for neontologists to look at a fundamentally different, phylogenetically basal member of the extant Cephalopoda. It was a w- win situation, combining paleontological deep-time perspectives, old fashioned expeditionary zeal, traditional biological approaches and new techniques. The results were cross-fertilized investigations in such disparate fields as ecology, functional morphology, taphonomy, genetics, phylogeny, locomotive dynamics, etc. As one reviewer of the xxxvi Introduction xxxvii book noted, Nautilus had gone from being one of the least known to one of the best understood of living cephalopods.

Coelacanth

Author: Peter L. Forey
Publisher: Forrest
ISBN: 9780955074097
Category : Coelaca
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The purpose of this book is to give an account of the life and times of a single species of fish, Latimeria chalumnae- the coelacanth (or are there now two species?). Before the discovery of the modern Latimeria, relationships of the coelacanths were thought to lie with the rhipidistians, a group of fossil fishes that many think are tetrapod ancestors. Hence, by looking at the modern coelacanth and assuming conservatism we may be able to reconstruct the life of the 'missing link' between fishes and tetrapods. The coelacanth is the only living animal to retain some structuralcharacteristics that were certainly present in the tetrapod ancestors, such as the intracranial joint. Therefore it is of some interest to try and find out how this joint works and what it is there for. The gene pool of the coelacanth has been separated from that of all other living vertebrates for at least 360 million years. Therefore, it is of some interest to find out how much deviation from contemporaneous fishes there has been. Coelacanths have often been used as the classic example of a particular evolutionary pattern whereby evolution is very fast in the early years and then slows down to stability and finally stagnation. This needs to be evaluated in the light of what we now know of the history of the coelacanths as a genetic lineage.

Genesis Kinds

Author: Todd Charles Wood
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606084909
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
A belief in creationism, even in young-age creationism, does not necessitate belief in the unique creation of each species. Instead, many creationists accept a secondary origin of species from ancestors originally created by God. In this view, groups of modern species constitute the "Genesis kinds" that God originally created and beyond which evolution cannot proceed (if it can even be called 'evolution'). In this collection of papers, six scholars examine the species and the Genesis kinds. Topics covered include the history of creationist and Christian perspectives on the origin of species, an analysis of the Hebrew word min (kind) from the perspective of biblical theology, a baseline of minimum speciation within kinds inferred from island endemics, a comprehensive list of proposed kinds from the mammalian fossil record, the occurrence of discontinuity between kinds, and the origin of new species by symbiosis. - Abstract.

Fossil Fish Found Alive

Author: Sally M. Walker
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
ISBN: 1575055368
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 76

Book Description
Describes the 1938 discovery of the coelacanth, a fish previously believed to be extinct, and subsequent research about it.

Experimental Approaches to Understanding Fossil Organisms

Author: Daniel I. Hembree
Publisher: Springer Science & Business
ISBN: 9401787212
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Book Description
Paleontologists and geologists struggle with research questions often complicated by the loss or even absence of key paleobiological and paleoenvironmental information. Insight into this missing data can be gained through direct exploration of analogous living organisms and modern environments. Creative, experimental and interdisciplinary treatments of such ancient-Earth analogs form the basis of Lessons from the Living. This volume unites a diverse range of expert paleontologists, neontologists and geologists presenting case studies that cover a spectrum of topics, including functional morphology, taphonomy, environments and organism-substrate interactions.

The Pony Fish's Glow

Author: George C. Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465072836
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
We may regard ourselves as the most advanced species on the planet, but have we really reached our optimum design? Isn't there always room for improvements? Before you answer, let noted evolutionary biologist George C. Williams remind you of both the exquisite adaptations and absurd maladaptations nature has bestowed upon us, the self-proclaimed ”pinnacle of evolution.”Picking up where Darwin left off, Williams combines philosophical perspective and scientific method to provide a foundation for the answers to some fascinating questions. He explains why our bodies have to deteriorate so disastrously with old age. He gives us logical reasons to explain why we crave foods like sugar and fat that have been proven time and again to be detrimental to our health. And Williams single-handedly deflates our Homo sapiens sapiens ego with such insights as: Our eyesight—it may seem superior, but not when compared to that of the invertebrate squid, whose eye has developed over time to prove more efficient than ours. And wouldn't it make more sense to have a third eye, located on the back of the head? We could have stereoscopic vision in front and rear-vision warning us of danger sneaking up behind. Rear-view mirrors would become a thing of the past. And why stop at three eyes?This fascinating new book is markedly different from all previous work on evolutionary biology. Using the pony fish and its luminescent abdomen as the perfect evolutionary mystery, Williams explores the intricacies of nature's designs. Rather than telling us how or why the pony fish got its light, Williams explains the functional reasons why the pony fish keeps its light. He also explains why our species keeps arbitrary or malfunctioned features like the reproductive and excretory systems' sharing of parts.George C. Williams, one of today's most qualified evolutionary biologists, has written an important, entertaining, and thought-provoking addition to a science that has captivated the world for almost 150 years.

The Wollemi Pine

Author: James Woodford
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 1921834897
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
In mid-1994 a National Parks & Wildlife ranger abseiling in the Wollemi Wilderness outside Sydney, came upon an extraordinary sight: a canyon filled with massive pines. What he accidentally discovered has become one of the century’s most important botanical finds. The ancient pines were thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.