Cambrian Ocean World

Cambrian Ocean World PDF Author: John Foster
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011884
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
This volume, aimed at the general reader, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian "explosion" is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Cambrian Ocean World tells the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet's long history.

Cambrian Ocean World

Cambrian Ocean World PDF Author: John Foster
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253011884
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume, aimed at the general reader, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian "explosion" is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Cambrian Ocean World tells the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet's long history.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History PDF Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245209
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
"[An] extraordinary book. . . . Mr. Gould is an exceptional combination of scientist and science writer. . . . He is thus exceptionally well placed to tell these stories, and he tells them with fervor and intelligence."—James Gleick, New York Times Book Review 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.

The Story of the Cambrian

The Story of the Cambrian PDF Author: Charles Penrhyn Gasquoine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cambrian Railways
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description


Cambrian Intelligence

Cambrian Intelligence PDF Author: Rodney Allen Brooks
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262522632
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Until the mid-1980s, AI researchers assumed that an intelligent system doing high-level reasoning was necessary for the coupling of perception and action. In this traditional model, cognition mediates between perception and plans of action. Realizing that this core AI, as it was known, was illusory, Rodney A. Brooks turned the field of AI on its head by introducing the behavior-based approach to robotics. The cornerstone of behavior-based robotics is the realization that the coupling of perception and action gives rise to all the power of intelligence and that cognition is only in the eye of an observer. Behavior-based robotics has been the basis of successful applications in entertainment, service industries, agriculture, mining, and the home. It has given rise to both autonomous mobile robots and more recent humanoid robots such as Brooks' Cog. This book represents Brooks' initial formulation of and contributions to the development of the behavior-based approach to robotics. It presents all of the key philosophical and technical ideas that put this "bottom-up" approach at the forefront of current research in not only AI but all of cognitive science.

CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION

CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION PDF Author: D Erwin
Publisher: Bedford
ISBN: 9781936221035
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Cambrian Period records one of the most extraordinary transitions in the history of life. Although animals may have first appeared nearly 700 million years ago, with the earliest sponges, their initial diversifications appear to have been modest until a richly diverse fossil fauna appeared abruptly about 170 million years later. In The Cambrian Explosion, Erwin and Valentine synthesize research from many fields to explain why there was such remarkable novelty of animal forms.

Darwin's Doubt

Darwin's Doubt PDF Author: Stephen C. Meyer
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062071491
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Book Description
When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.

Darwin's Lost World

Darwin's Lost World PDF Author: Martin Brasier
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191613908
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
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.

The Crucible of Creation

The Crucible of Creation PDF Author: Simon Conway Morris
Publisher: Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris provides a guided tour of the world's richest treasure trove of fossils--a fantastically rich deposit of bizarre and bewildering Cambrain fossils, located in Western Canada. 4 plates. 90 linecuts.

Why Evolution is True

Why Evolution is True PDF Author: Jerry A. Coyne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019164384X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and drawn from many disparate fields of science. The very latest research is uncovering a stream of evidence revealing evolution in action - from the actual observation of a species splitting into two, to new fossil discoveries, to the deciphering of the evidence stored in our genome. Why Evolution is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development to demonstrate the 'indelible stamp' of the processes first proposed by Darwin. It is a crisp, lucid, and accessible statement that will leave no one with an open mind in any doubt about the truth of evolution.

The Cambrian Way

The Cambrian Way PDF Author: George Tod
Publisher: Cicerone Press Limited
ISBN: 1783627689
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Dubbed 'the mountain connoisseurs' walk', the Cambrian Way stretches 479km between the mighty castles of Cardiff in the south and Conwy on the north coast. Traversing the heartland of Wales, the challenging route crosses the Brecon Beacons, the Cambrian Mountains and Snowdonia, passing through two national parks and visiting many of the country's iconic summits, including Pen y Fan, Pumlumon, Cadair Idris and Snowdon itself. It can be walked in three weeks (or in shorter sections) and is suitable for experienced hillwalkers with sound navigational skills. The guide presents the route in 21 stages, offering comprehensive route description illustrated with OS 1:50,000 mapping and elevation profiles. Details of accommodation and facilities are provided, along with a helpful trek planner showing their distribution along the route: although the trail passes through remote areas, it is possible to stay under a roof every night - though camping is also a possibility, should you prefer. There are background notes on Wales's history and geology and local points of interest, and a glossary of Welsh place-names, useful contacts and accommodation listings can be found in the appendices. From the Black Mountains to the Rhinogau, Glyderau and Carneddau, the route takes in lofty ridges, striking peaks and picturesque lakes. There are also fascinating glimpses into the country's ancient and more recent past: Iron Age hillforts, Norman castles, a Cistercian abbey, the Chartist Cave and relics from the mining industry. Offering superlative scenery, the Cambrian Way is a celebration of some of the best mountain walking Wales has to offer and promises a unique opportunity to immerse yourself in these celebrated landscapes.