Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals speak to us of seminal events in the history of life. They range from humble algal mats dating back more than two billion years, to hardy musk oxen, which linger as the last vestiges of Ice Age megafauna. Their existence today offers us a tantalising glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history; of landscapes long vanished; of mass extinctions that changed the face of nature.
Fortey takes us on an incredible journey to these ancient worlds; on a moonlit beach in Delaware where the horseshoe crab shuffles its way through a violent romance, we catch a glimpse of life 450 million years ago. Along a stretch of Australian coastline, we bear witness to the sights that would have greeted a Precambrian dawn. And, in the dense rainforests of New Zealand where the secretive velvet worm creeps through rotting timber, we marvel at a living fossil which has survived almost unchanged since before the break-up of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent, over 150 million years ago.
Written with Fortey’s customary sparkle and gusto, this wonderfully engrossing exploration of the world’s survivors combines the very best science writing about the origins of life with an explorer’s sense of adventure and a poet’s wonder at the natural world.
Discover the lives of animals and plants; the passage of the seasons; visits by fellow enthusiasts; the play of light between branches; the influence of geology; and how woodland has shaped history, architecture and industry. On every page Fortey shows how an intimate study of one small wood can reveal so much about the natural world, and demonstrates his relish for the incomparable pleasures of discovery.
In this memoir Richard Fortey offers an unforgettable portrait of how restless curiosity about the natural world led him to become a leading scientist and writer. From childhood experiments in a garden shed laboratory to a tent high in the Arctic in pursuit of fossils, this is a personal story of obsession, and a moving celebration of the natural world as a playground, a refuge and a muse for a life’s work filled with wonder.