Book description
Around 370 million years ago, a distant relative of a modern lungfish
began a most extraordinary adventure-emerging from the water and
laying claim to the land. Over the next 70 million years, this
tentative beachhead had developed into a worldwide colonization by
ever-increasing varieties of four-limbed creatures known as tetrapods,
the ancestors of all vertebrate life on land. This new edition of
Jennifer A. Clack's groundbreaking book tells the complex story of
their emergence and evolution. Beginning with their closest relatives,
the lobe-fin fishes such as lungfishes and coelacanths, Clack defines
what a tetrapod is, describes their anatomy, and explains how they are
related to other vertebrates. She looks at the Devonian environment in
which they evolved, describes the known and newly discovered species,
and explores the order and timing of anatomical changes that occurred
during the fish-to-tetrapod transition.
"A wonderful tale encrypted in fossils, genes, and
flesh." -Carl Zimmer, author of At the Water's Edge
Jennifer A. Clack is Professor and Curator of Vertebrate
Palaeontology at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. She was
awarded the 2008 Daniel Giraud Elliot medal, by the U. S. National
Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal
Society and a Foreign Honorary Member by the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
