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Skeletons - The Frame of Life (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R539
Discovery Miles 5 390
You Save: R121
(18%)
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Skeletons - The Frame of Life (Hardcover)
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List price R660
Loot Price R539
Discovery Miles 5 390
You Save R121 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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Over half a billion years ago life on earth took an incredible step
in evolution, when animals learned to build skeletons. Using many
different materials, from calcium carbonate and phosphate, and even
silica, to make shell and bone, they started creating the support
structures that are now critical to most living forms, providing
rigidity and strength. Manifesting in a vast variety of forms, they
provided the framework for sophisticated networks of life that
fashioned the evolution of Earth's oceans, land, and atmosphere.
Within a few tens of millions of years, all of the major types of
skeleton had appeared. Skeletons enabled an unprecedented array of
bodies to evolve, from the tiniest seed shrimp to the gigantic
dinosaurs and blue whales. The earliest bacterial colonies
constructed large rigid structures - stromatolites - built up by
trapping layers of sediment, while the mega-skeleton that is the
Great Barrier Reef is big enough to be visible from space. The
skeletons of millions of coccolithophores that lived in the shallow
seas of the Mesozoic built the white cliffs of Dover. These, and
insects, put their scaffolding on the outside, as an exoskeleton,
while vertebrates have endoskeletons. Plants use tubes of dead
tissue for rigidity and transport of liquids - which in the case of
tall trees need to be strong enough to extend 100 m or more from
the ground. Others simply stitch together a coating from mineral
grains on the seabed. In Skeletons, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark
Williams explore the incredible variety of the skeleton innovations
that have enabled life to expand into a wide range of niches and
lifestyles on the planet. Discussing the impact of climate change,
which puts the formation of some kinds of skeleton at risk, they
also consider future skeletons, including the possibility that we
might increasingly incorporate metal and plastic elements into our
own, as well as the possible materials for skeleton building on
other planets.
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