You can purchase this book clicking here.

If you wish to purchase further titles already reviewed here, please return each time to SBB. Using the direct links available at our site is easier than searching by title, author, or ISBN number.

EDITORIAL INFORMATION

During an expedition in Mexico, paleontologist Mark McMenamin unearthed fossils of creatures dating from approximately 600 million years ago, making them the oldest animal fossils ever discovered. These strange circular fossils, known as Ediacarans, seemed to defy explanation. Are they animals or some type of organism? And how could such complex forms of life appear so suddenly, without extensive records of prior evolution? This seemed to be exactly what the Ediacarans had done.

The Garden of Ediacara follows McMenamin on a baffling detective trail to a major scientific discovery. With a party including renowned paleontologist Adolf Seilacher, the author travels to Namibia to investigate a spectacular cast made from a colony of fossils in the Nama desert. He chronicles the long, often futile search made by earlier scientists for Ediacara, and the various types of Ediacaran fossils that have been uncovered in the years since.

A marine life form that existed in Precambrian times, as much as fifty million years before life on earth began to diversify rapidly, Ediacarans bore a superficial resemblance to jellyfish. McMenamin concludes that although Ediacarans were related to animals, they were no animals in the strict sense because they never passed through an embryonic stage. But they seem to have developed a central nervous system and brains independent from animal evolution. This finding has profound ramifications for our understanding of evolutionary biology, for it indicates that the path toward intelligence life was embarked upon more than once on this planet.

Mark A.S. McMenamin is professor of geology at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of a number of ground-breaking books on paleobiology and evolution.

(Extracted from the press release).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.

-Foreword.

-Preface.

-Acknowledgments.

-1. Mystery Fossil.

-2. The Sand Menagerie.

-3. Vermiforma.

-4. The Nama Group.

-5. Back to the Garden.

-6. Cloudina.

-7. Ophrydium.

-8. Reunite Rodinia!

-9. The Mexican Find: Sonora.

-10. The Lost World.

-11. A Family Tree.

-12. Awareness of Ediacara.

-13. Revenge of the Mole Rats.

-Epilogue: Parallel Evolution.

-Appendix.

-Index.