Adventures of Species. Vampironogs, Spider-tailed Ones and Other Transitional Forms in Animal Evolution

This book is about paleontology — the only science that can show who the ancestors of different beings inhabiting today's Earth were. Not long ago, we didn't even suspect that whales are descended from 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 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, as it turns out, looked completely different than 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.