Book: Darwin's Lost World
by Prof M. D. Brasier, Oxford University Press
Darwin was famously troubled by the apparent lack of any fossil record before the Cambrian period. If indeed no fossils existed, his theory of evolution would be proved wrong.
The challenging search to find a pre-Cambrian fossil record has been one the great quests of 20th-century geology. Now one of its leading figures, Martin Brasier, tells the story of the adventures, the hard science, and the discoveries: among them, and extraordinary world of enigmatic soft-bodied creatures which seem to have lived and died before the dawn of the Cambrian.
His expeditions take us to the remote wilds of Mongolia and Siberia during the Cold War, to the depths of the Caribbean seas, and to the run up to the phenomenal explosion of animal life 540 million years ago.
On sale now - paperback due out in March 2010