Europe
The First 100 Million Years
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A place of exceptional diversity, rapid change, and high energy, Europe has literally been at the crossroads of the world ever since the interaction of Asia, North America and Africa formed the tropical island archipelago that would become the continent of today.
In this unprecedented evolutionary history, Tim Flannery shows how for the past 100 million years Europe has absorbed wave after wave of immigrant species; taking them in, transforming them, and sometimes hybridising them. Flannery reveals how, in addition to playing a vital role in the evolution of our own species, Europe was once the site of the formation of the first coral reefs, the home of some of the world's largest elephants, and now has more wolves than North America.
This groundbreaking book charts the history of the land itself and the forces shaping life on it - including modern humans - to create a portrait of a continent that continues to exert a huge influence on the world today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paleontologist Flannery (Atmosphere of Hope) pulls back the curtain on Europe's past environments, while also giving a glimpse of its possible future, in this marvelous work. Flannery begins 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs still walked the Earth and Europe was a "tropical archipelago." In this and each following section, Flannery introduces readers to the species that coexisted during a particular epoch, ranging from the very small to the very large and always including examples of the very strange, such as the "hell pigs" of the Oligocene period, between 33 million and 23 million years ago, or the Deinogalerix, the largest hedgehog to ever live, during the Miocene, between 23 million and five million years ago. Flannery also tracks the ebb and flow of less exotic species, such as relatives of bears, elephants, giraffes, and humans, and, throughout, shares a plethora of surprising facts, such as that "falcons and robins are more closely related to each other than are falcons and hawks." In the final chapters, Flannery discusses the prospects for "rewilding" Europe perhaps by importing once-native species, including lions and elephants. Beyond this book's obvious appeal to conservation-minded Europeans, it should attract any reader interested in the past and future of the natural world.
