Adventures of species. Zhuravlev A.

This book about paleontology is the only science that is able to show who the ancestors of different creatures inhabiting today's land were. More recently, we did not even suspect that the whales lead their family from the greenhouses, birds from dinosaurs, and beetles and spiders - of course, through many intermediate stages - from worms with a proboscis and claws on soft paws. Yes, molecular biology can explain who whose relative is, and prove that birds are closer to crocodiles than to turtles, and whales - to hippos than to bears. But what did these poultry -codils or whalebemota look like? All living things were constantly changing, all organisms were actually transitional forms and, it turns out, looked completely different than we can assume, studying the modern natural world. It is impossible to cover all these forms in one book, but let's try to talk about the most interesting.