Our world almost ended a long time ago. When a 10-kilometre-long rock appeared high in the sky in the Northern Hemisphere 66 million years ago and slammed into the shallow sea near Chicxulub in what is now Yucatan, Mexico, at thousands of kilometers per second, it was a sign of that. The beginning of a new era for Earth. The impact shattered the Earth's crust, spraying magma into the sky, and pulses of heat set fires to forests around the world. On the other side of the Earth from the impact, deep fissures opened in the Indian Ocean. The sky has darkened for many years. Life on Earth has witnessed a profound turning point, and not only dinosaurs fell victim.
This is how Thomas Halliday describes one of the most important events in Earth's history in “Urwelten.” The paleontologist and evolutionary biologist knows how to take his readers back to the eras that shaped the evolution of life on Earth. This life has been around for about four billion years; And life is greater than a single-celled organism for about two billion years. During this time, a wide variety of life forms and ecosystems emerged, sometimes more and sometimes less different from their present appearance. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to visit these primordial worlds. But there's plenty of evidence of what that might look like.
An insightful journey through time
These fossil remains are the kind of puzzle that, when pieced together, paints a completely plausible picture of the blue planet's ancient landscape. Halliday presents these geological eras to us in narrative form. It takes us back billions of years of its geology and introduces us to its fascinating ecosystems. Somewhat surprisingly, it begins with the modern history of the Earth, discussing the melting of the last ice age. He then works his way through the different eras until he finally concludes his stories in the period 550 million years ago with an image of the Ediacara. In this chapter, the author briefly leaves Earth, where ancient life occurred only in water, and wanders through space. You will feel the universe at that time. At that time, the Moon was 12,000 kilometers closer to Earth, and its brightness was 15% brighter than it is today. Many of the stars that we observe in the sky today were not yet visible, such as the North Star, which only began to shine in the Cretaceous period.
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