Skeletons: The Frame of Life pdf

莱斯特大学古生物学教授 扬·扎拉谢维奇 深入研究了人类世。 Jan Zalasiewicz 是英国莱斯特大学古生物学教授。 在早期的职业生涯中，他是英国地质调查局的野外地质学家和古生物学家，致力于破译英格兰东部的地层，然后是威尔士中部的山脉。 现在，他为本科生和研究生教授地质学和地球历史，并研究超过 50 亿年地质时间的化石生态系统和环境。 在过去的几年里，他一直参与帮助发展关于人类世的想法，这是人类现在在地球表面推动大量地质学的概念，并担任国际地层学委员会人类世工作组的主席。

Skeletons: The Frame of Life pdf 扬·扎拉谢维奇

Over half a billion years ago life on earth took an incredible step in evolution, when animals learned to build skeletons. Using many different materials, from calcium carbonate and phosphate, and even silica, to make shell and bone, they started creating the support structures that are now critical to most living forms, providing rigidity and strength. Manifesting in a vast variety of forms, they provided the framework for sophisticated networks of life that fashioned the evolution of Earth's oceans, land, and atmosphere. Within a few tens of millions of years, all of the major types of skeleton had appeared. Skeletons enabled an unprecedented array of bodies to evolve, from the tiniest seed shrimp to the gigantic dinosaurs and blue whales. The earliest bacterial colonies constructed large rigid structures - stromatolites - built up by trapping layers of sediment, while the mega-skeleton that is the Great Barrier Reef is big enough to be visible from space. The skeletons of millions of coccolithophores that lived in the shallow seas of the Mesozoic built the white cliffs of Dover. These, and insects, put their scaffolding on the outside, as an exoskeleton, while vertebrates have endoskeletons. Plants use tubes of dead tissue for rigidity and transport of liquids - which in the case of tall trees need to be strong enough to extend 100 m or more from the ground. Others simply stitch together a coating from mineral grains on the seabed. In Skeletons, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams explore the incredible variety of the skeleton innovations that have enabled life to expand into a wide range of niches and lifestyles on the planet. Discussing the impact of climate change, which puts the formation of some kinds of skeleton at risk, they also consider future skeletons, including the possibility that we might increasingly incorporate metal and plastic elements into our own, as well as the possible materials for skeleton building on other planets. Table of contents :