A Brief History of Life on Earth
Clémence Dupont
Prestel Children’s Books

Wow! This story of life on earth truly does unfold in dramatic concertina style – to the length of one of the dinosaurs included herein, a triceratops. That though is getting ahead of things for the book begins around 4.6 billion years ago in the Hadean Age when the Earth was mega-hot and very young, the first eon of Earth history.

Thereafter comes a whistle-stop tour of the fifteen subsequent geological periods, each of which has a factual paragraph and a superb illustration.

It’s at the end of the Proterozoic Age, in what’s called the Ediacaran Period, the first (soft-bodied) organisms appeared.

Next, the Cambrian Period was when aquatic life exploded around the coastlines of continents and evolution of life gave rise to a huge variety of forms including some with a skeleton, digestive system, eyes and gills.

Aquatic life developed a-pace through the Ordovician Period (-490 to 445 million years ago) and plant life began to move onto the mainland in the form of mosses and fungi.

Then came the Silurian Period and the Devonian period, the latter being a time of extreme heat during which life diversified even more. The first sharks appeared and animal life began to make the move towards land.

We’ve now reached the Carboniferous period with its great trees, huge insects and a wealth of plant life, which eventually became buried and over 1000,000s of years compressed to form deposits of coal.

By the Permian Period, the land masses had come together creating a vast super-continent when reptile-like mammals roamed only to die out and become replaced in the Triassic Period by mammals, the first amphibians and the soon-to-be dominant dinosaurs.

Did you know that the continental split began in the Jurassic Period, the golden age of dinosaurs including Diplodocus, Ankylosaurus and Archaeopteryx. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods saw a further drifting apart of continents and the appearance of Tyrannosaurus as well as bees and flowering plants.

Moving forwards to the hot, humid Paleogene Period, there was a huge diversification of birds and mammals around the globe; then again the climate cooled and during the Neogene Period apes, ancestors of the elephant appeared, and ungulates became widespread.
Humans evolved into their modern form during the Pleistocene Epoch becoming hunters and fishers; they also began to develop language and artistic expression.
We’re now in the Holocene Epoch, which began 11,700 years ago and readers will recognise the modern landscape shown on this penultimate spread.

Phew – such astonishing changes and so beautifully presented in this zigzag style book. A-MA-ZING!