The Adventures of Types. Vampironogs, Spider-Tails, and Other Transitional Forms in the Evolution of Animals

This book is about paleontology — the only science capable of showing who the ancestors of various beings populating today's Earth were. Just recently, we didn't even suspect that whales descend from even-toed ungulates, birds from dinosaurs, and beetles and spiders — of course, through many intermediate stages — from worms with trunks and claws on soft paws. Yes, molecular biology can explain who is related to whom and prove that birds are closer to crocodiles than to turtles, and whales are closer to hippos than to bears. But what did these bird-crocodiles or whale-hippos look like? All living things have constantly changed; all organisms were actually transitional forms and, it turns out, looked completely different from what one might assume when studying the modern natural world. It is impossible to cover all these forms in one book, but we will try to tell about the most interesting ones.