A New History of Life

1 The Interconnected Earth / 2 The Vast Depths of Earth Time / 3 Fossil Clocks / 4 Paleontologists as Detectives / 5 The Shifting Surface of Planet Earth / 6 Earliest Origins—Formation of the Planet / 7 Origins of Land, Ocean, and Air / 8 The Early Chemical Evolution of Life / 9 Hints of the First Life Forms / 10 How Life Transformed the Early Earth / 11 Snowball Earth—Another Crisis / 12 Metazoans—Life Grows Up / 13 Incredible Variety—The Cambrian Explosion / 14 Window to a Lost World—The Burgess Shale / 15 The Forgotten Fossils in Earth’s Story / 16 Introduction to the Great Mass Extinctions / 17 The Collapse of Earth’s First Eden / 18 Making the Break for Land / 19 Getting a Backbone—The Story of Vertebrates / 20 The Evolution of Jaws / 21 These Limbs Were Made for Walking? / 22 Tiktaalik—The Search for a Fishapod / 23 Carboniferous Giants and Coal / 24 Amniotes—The Shape of Things to Come / 25 Permian Extinction—Life’s Worst Catastrophe / 26 Finding the Killer—The Greenhouse Earth / 27 The Dinosaurs Take Over / 28 Letting the Dinosaurs Speak—Paleobehavior / 29 Conquering the Air—The Evolution of Flight / 30 Monsters of the Deep—Mesozoic Oceans / 31 The Cretaceous Earth—A Tropical Planet / 32 The Sky Is Falling—End of the Dinosaurs / 33 The Collision of North and South America / 34 The Rise of Mammals and the Last Ice Age / 35 The Humble Origins of Human Beings / 36 The Conscious Earth