Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves

A journey through the great mass extinction events that have shaped our Earth.

This  timely and original book lays out the latest scientific understanding  of mass extinction on our planet. Cutting-edge techniques across  biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our  understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously  unknown mass extinction. This compelling evidence, revealing a series of  environmental crises resulting in the near collapse of life on Earth,  illuminates our current dilemmas in exquisite detail.

Beginning  with the oldest, Professor Michael J. Benton takes us through the “big  five” die outs: the Late Ordovician, which set the evolution of the  first animals on an entirely new course; the Late Devonian, apparently  brought on by global warming; the cataclysmic End-Permian, also known as  the Great Dying, which wiped out over 90 percent of alllife on Earth;  the newly discovered Carnian Pluvial Event; and the End-Cretaceous  asteroid. He examines how global warming, acid rain, ocean  acidification, erupting volcanoes, and meteorite impact have affected  conditions on Earth, and how life survived, adapted, and evolved.

Benton’s  expert retelling of scientific breakthroughs in paleobiology is  illustrated throughout with photographs of fossils and fieldwork, and  artistic reconstructions of ancient environments. In Extinctions,  readers will learn about revolutionary new tools used to uncover  ancient extinction events and processes in forensic detail, and how  scientists are improving our understanding of the deep past. New  research allows us to link long-ago upheavals to crises in our current  age, the Anthropocene, with important consequences for us all.