Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Wormsby Richard Fortey
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780307275530
Publication Date: December 11, 2012
Pages: 332
Genre: Natural Science, Non-fiction, Science
Publisher: Vintage Books
Evolution, it seems, has not completely obliterated its tracks as more advanced organisms have evolved; the history of life on earth is far older—and odder—than many of us realize.
Scattered across the globe, these remarkable plants and animals continue to mark seminal events in geological time. From a moonlit beach in Delaware, where the hardy horseshoe crab shuffles its way to a frenzy of mass mating just as it did 450 million years ago, to the dense rainforests of New Zealand, where the elusive, unprepossessing velvet worm has burrowed deep into rotting timber since before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, to a stretch of Australian coastline with stromatolite formations that bear witness to the Precambrian dawn, the existence of these survivors offers us a tantalizing glimpse of pivotal points in evolutionary history. These are not “living fossils” but rather a handful of tenacious creatures of days long gone.
Written in buoyant, sparkling prose, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms is a marvelously captivating exploration of the world’s old-timers combining the very best of science writing with an explorer’s sense of adventure and wonder.
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.
NB: Some quick research into the venomous mammal bit, and the slow loris is the only venomous primate; of course there are a handful of other venomous mammals, including my beloved (male) platypus. I tried to find the reference in the text again, but I can’t remember which chapter it was in, and the index yields nothing for venom, so now I’m thinking he might have been referring to primates, not mammals, and the slow loris discovery was post-publication.