Cambrian Ocean World

Ancient Sea Life of North America (Life of the Past Series)

By: John Foster

Narrated by: David Stifel

Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

This volume, aimed at the general audience, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian "explosion" is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Cambrian Ocean World tells the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet's long history.

©2014 John Foster (P)2022 Tantor

This is unreadable

Maybe this is a textbook but is not written to be read. Unless you like a million very large names

Useless without a PDF of the illustrations

The print version apparently has tons of photos and illustrations that directly relate to the fauna being described in exquisite detail. Without the visuals there is no context for the differences among species or of all the many animals found in different rock layers. It's a good book, but I returned the audiobook and will get the print version.