Martin Brasier, "Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life"
2010 | ISBN-10: 0199548978 | PDF | 288 pages | 3,2 MB
It greatly puzzled Darwin that the most ancient rocks, those dating before the Cambrian period, seemed to be barren of fossils when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Decades of work by modern paleontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian. Yet hidden in these depths is a great mystery--something happened around the Cambrian to dramatically speed up evolution and produce many of the early forms of
animals we know today--and scientists don't really know what provided that spark.