DINOSAURS TO CHICKENS

A clamber along branches of the Tree of Life, past prehistoric ancestors of 30 animals from monarch butterflies to modern dogs, cats, and humans.

Starting off with an image of a spreading tree festooned with creatures, over the course of this book Rose arranges well over 100 extinct antecedents to living species along sinuous, branching lines that visually connect evolutionary adaptations and cousins. Properly noting that fossil records are spotty at best—and also that, given convergent evolution and life’s reluctance to fall into tidy classifications, the whole notion of distinct species is “messy in practice”—Lund relies on researchers’ best guesses about relationships and timing as he points out significant developments in each lineage. Plants get so little attention that their appearance is misplaced on a timeline as coming after that of insects. Still, for the 30 chosen animals, at least, tracing the connections will leave readers much more conscious of how, for instance, wings developed in fauna as diverse as bugs, birds, and bats, or how the hooved, rabbit-size Diacodexis could come to count pigs, giraffes, and blue whales among its descendants—not to mention why the ability of early ape Sahelanthropus to walk upright was “quite literally, a huge step forward” on the road to Homo sapiens (both depicted here as generic sketches).

Dense but readable and illuminating.