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    Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind
    Unavailable
    Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind
    Unavailable
    Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind
    Ebook606 pages7 hours

    Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind

    By Richard Fortey

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9780007441389
    Unavailable
    Survivors: The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind
    Author

    Richard Fortey

    Richard Fortey retired from his position as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in 2006. He is the author of several books, including ‘Fossils: A Key to the Past’, ‘The Hidden Landscape’ which won The Natural World Book of the Year in 1993, ‘Life: An Unauthorised Biography’, ‘Trilobite!’ and ‘The Earth: An Intimate History’. He has been elected to be President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

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    Reviews for Survivors

    3.5/5

    64 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An excellent foray into biological history- the living facsimiles of ancient phyla for starters, then delving into the survivors of various mass extinctions (in fact, it was originally published as Survivors in Great Britain). A bit on the drier side of popular science books, but still fascinating.
    • 4/5
      The author looks at the deep history of living things. He spends most of his time on survivors (he prefers not to call them living fossils, though he does use that term for organisms that were found as fossils first and later discovered alive). He starts with the horseshoe crab of the title, then moves on to the velvet worm. The title organisms dispensed with in the first chapters, he moves through life in a wide variety of environments, traveling around the world to visit some of the most primitive organisms. He does not claim that these organisms are unchanged from the fossils; they merely look essentially the same, though there are doubtless some changes in their DNA. My only complaint comes from a minor nitpick: he is wrong when he says horsetails don't have leaves. Their leaves are fused into a collar around the stem. Otherwise a good read, easy to follow, hard to put down.
    • 4/5
      The erudite Fortey takes readers on fascinating, entertaining tour of life’s history told through the stories of organisms that have survived, almost unchanged, throughout time. It is Fortey's curiosity and irrepressible enthusiasm for his subjects that make this book such a pleasure to read.
    • 4/5
      The author looks at the deep history of living things. He spends most of his time on survivors (he prefers not to call them living fossils, though he does use that term for organisms that were found as fossils first and later discovered alive). He starts with the horseshoe crab of the title, then moves on to the velvet worm. The title organisms dispensed with in the first chapters, he moves through life in a wide variety of environments, traveling around the world to visit some of the most primitive organisms. He does not claim that these organisms are unchanged from the fossils; they merely look essentially the same, though there are doubtless some changes in their DNA. My only complaint comes from a minor nitpick: he is wrong when he says horsetails don't have leaves. Their leaves are fused into a collar around the stem. Otherwise a good read, easy to follow, hard to put down.
    • 5/5
      This book had me hooked from the acknowledgements, in which the author sincerely, personally, and also succinctly thanked a wide range of his friends and colleagues all over the world who had assisted with various aspects of his research and travels. Reading it makes you realize this is the NICEST MAN IN THE WORLD. And he's English, so I imagine he's even nicer if he doesn't like you, because he feels he should make up for it. This made me realize that my only goal in this life or any other is to do something worthy of adding to Dr. Fortay's infinitely nice universe. I wonder if he wants to study any fossils in Lake Erie.In this book, the author presents a number of living species that have relatively direct connections to ancient life, and uses them as examples to illustrate various aspects of evolution. This was all very fascinating, although I should mention that while I am the kind of armchair science reader who can manage to dimly grasp the scientific principle in question while I am in the moment of reading about it, it becomes very vague and misty by the time it is referenced again two or three chapters later. That's ok, though, because Dr. Fortay has my trust. It was also filled with crazy facts about evolution and animals and science. Fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants (this kept me up at night, why?) and there are giant salamanders as long as a person (OMG, get OUT with that!).This book also made me reflect on how I can completely understand why creationists decide to be creationists. Okay, well not completely understand, because hello, fossil record. But I can empathize with how utterly lunatic it appears to buy into the idea that first you have chemicals floating around that become proteins ... and then you have koalas. It does seem ridiculous at first blush.
    • 4/5
      It took me a long time to finish because it was so sciencey and dense with information, but it was very entertaining and enlightening! The author clearly has an affinity for the lifeforms he describes, and for life as a whole. He has a way of making you feel the same way. Even for beetles and worms.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this enough that I've reserved the other books by Richard Fortey that my local library has. He has a somewhat rambling style, though, which might not be to your taste. I enjoyed the ride, in general; in terms of the science, I didn't learn anything I didn't already know, concept-wise, but some of the animals and habitats Fortey described were new to me. It was quite personal to him, in a way, covering stuff he's particularly interested in and documenting his travels to find these creatures (to the extent of talking about sipping gin and tonic from a plastic cup while sat on the balcony of the inn at Yellowstone). That might be less than interesting to some, but I did quite like knowing about the wider habitats surrounding these creatures, and the human context that they're so often really close to, maybe even endangered by.The inserts with colour photos are nice: words generally work better for me than pictures, so I wasn't that interested, but it does give you a glance at some of the stranger, more anciently derived creatures of our planet.
    • 4/5
      This ended up with 4 stars because I struggle with timelines that stretch over billions of years.  I find the science riveting, but when the text starts throwing around Ages and Periods like Cretaceous and Mesozoic and Mesoproterozoic like we'd talk about events that happened to us last week, my eyes glaze over and my comprehension rate plummets through the floor.Still Fortey deserves better; he's an excellent writer, one who mixes personal anecdotes with hard science very well.  He only slipped up once and made evolution sound like a sentient decision making process on the part of the specimen in question, but perhaps he was only making a point.In this book he visits a list of life (flora, fauna, and microscopic) whose branch on the tree of life has survived the ages, evolving through catastrophic events only to wind up in the here and now, where humans will likely figure out a way to kill them off.  Except, sadly, for the cockroaches, and, happily, the sea monkeys.  He ties these fascinating species of today to their ancestors of the past and discusses where current thinking places them on the tree of life: are they closer to the trunk (truly amongst the first) or are they closer to the tips of the branches (the newcomers, or - in our case - the party crashers).This is one of those books that, because of their built-in uniqueness in flora and fauna, the antipodean part of the world becomes the star.  There are a lot of critters featured here that are found in New Zealand and Australia.  Not taking anything away from my home country, these were my favourites.  I need to be on the lookout for the velvet worm, and I have a new appreciation for the extreme mothering practices of the Echidna.  I think seeing a lungfish might be kinda cool.Fortey does get one thing wrong: he says no mammal is venomous.  I don't know if this is because the book was written before the slow loris was found to have venom glands, or if that discovery just stayed under his radar.  It's a small thing in the overall body of knowledge in the book and has no consequence in the context of the subject matter under discussion.Not an easy reading book, but one that's worth the time and effort.
    • 3/5
      I gave this latest exploration of our planet's past, present and future by Richard Fortey three stars because it felt a bit programmatic, less spontaneous, than other of his books I have read. I am being unfair to Fortey, because like his other books, this one is well-written, almost poetry in some passages, and fascinating. He writes a kinder, gentler brief for evolution by focusing on species that seem from the fossil record to have survived unchanged for millions of years and discussing ways the current, living creatures both resemble and differ from their fossilized relatives. For example, I learned about as much as I want to about stromatolites and just enough to whet my curiosity about several kinds of plants and birds.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating and reverent tour of a niche of certain type of organism - those that have changed little from their distant ancestors some hundreds of millions of years ago.

      This really is a tour, with velvet worms, and gingko trees, and the horseshoe crabs of the Atlantic coast, the three-BILLION year old stromatolites, which bubbled oxygen into our atmosphere, the multicolored bacteria of Yellowstone, and every fascinating little thing in between.

      So what does it take for an organism to survive so long, when so many of its contemporaries have vanished, some not even leaving a fossil record? Durability? Adaptions? A niche? Luck? Perhaps all of the above.

      Excellent reading, excellent natural history. Recommended.