Customer Reviews

From the Beginning: The Story of Human Evolution

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This is a great book. It's like a very detailed version of the little "string art" animation of evolution in Sagan's "Cosmos" series. The book includes copious diagrams of species and their relationships, body morphology through successive species, and interesting drawings of many selected species along the ancestry of Hominids. It's geared for, maybe, 12 to 15 year old kids, though my five year old loves me to read sections, and I pore over it too!

I teach second grade and this is more on a fifth or sixth grade level at least but I'm going get it for my classroom anyway.

For a much broader sense of the place of evolution in the context of geology and ecology, on an adult level, I very highly recommend Dinosaur Odyssey, Fossil Thread in the Web of Life by Scott Samson. This is a book that will greatly inform my teaching in the future.Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

I'm 41 and interested in Science. I was looking for a good overview of the evolution of Mammals and what were the important evolutionary developments. Some of the books I've read are very detailed, and take many pages discussing the evolution of a part of the skull, or a single bone in the wrist. I'm not a professional scientist and not interested in that much depth.

What I liked about this book is it touched upon many things, without being too detailed. It discusses the gradual development and improvement of animals. Such as the development of the mouth, gills, and finally jaws. How different types of teeth formed, and their function. How the skeletal structure of certain animals changed, allowing them to walk on lad, and then walk far or land. Some Mammals chew their food, allowing them to break it down faster than those that just swallow it. The Montremes (mammals that lay eggs like the Platypus) branched off around 200 million years ago, the Marsupials more recently.

Its got some nice charts, and will take a few hours to read.
After reading this book, you will have a general idea of Mammalian/Human evolution and can decide if you want to study it in greater depth and read other books on the subject.