The Adventures of Species: Vampire Legs, Spider Tails, and Other Transitional Forms in Animal Evolution

This book is about paleontology – the only science capable of showing who the ancestors of various creatures inhabiting today's Earth were. Until quite recently, we even suspected that whales descended from artiodactyls, birds from dinosaurs, and beetles and spiders – of course, through numerous 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 that whales are closer to hippopotamuses than to bears. But what did these bird-crocodiles or whale-hippopotamuses look like? All living things have constantly changed, all organisms were actually transitional forms, and it turns out they looked completely different than one might assume by 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.