Life is stranger than fiction. Recent investigations hint at episodes in the history of life on Earth that rival the most imaginative movies. For example: Could our planet have been seeded with life from elsewhere? Did the development of life create conditions that threatened to poison the biosphere? How have natural forces conspired, over and over, to remove most traces of life from the planet? And how has life itself responded with determination to survive and thrive in a multitude of astonishing forms? Topics:1 The Interconnected Earth2 The Vast Depths of Earth Time3 Fossil Clocks4 Paleontologists as Detectives5 The Shifting Surface of Planet Earth6 Earliest Origins—Formation of the Planet7 Origins of Land, Ocean, and Air8 The Early Chemical Evolution of Life9 Hints of the First Life Forms10 How Life Transformed the Early Earth11 Snowball Earth—Another Crisis12 Metazoans—Life Grows Up13 Incredible Variety—The Cambrian Explosion14 Window to a Lost World—The Burgess Shale15 The Forgotten Fossils in Earth’s Story16 Introduction to the Great Mass Extinctions17 The Collapse of Earth’s First Eden18 Making the Break for Land19 Getting a Backbone—The Story of Vertebrates20 The Evolution of Jaws21 These Limbs Were Made for Walking?22 Tiktaalik—The Search for a Fishapod23 Carboniferous Giants and Coal24 Amniotes—The Shape of Things to Come25 Permian Extinction—Life’s Worst Catastrophe26 Finding the Killer—The Greenhouse Earth27 The Dinosaurs Take Over28 Letting the Dinosaurs Speak—Paleobehavior29 Conquering the Air—The Evolution of Flight30 Monsters of the Deep—Mesozoic Oceans31 The Cretaceous Earth—A Tropical Planet32 The Sky Is Falling—End of the Dinosaurs33 The Collision of North and South America34 The Rise of Mammals and the Last Ice Age35 The Humble Origins of Human Beings36 The Conscious Earth
