Training a powerful lens on the microscopic wonders of the
universe, hundreds of photos, both exquisite and strange, accompany
this startling expose of a secret world invisibly evolving around
us for billions of years. Silver Winner of the 2021 IBPA Benjamin
Franklin Award for Nature & Environment Microfossils-the most
abundant, ancient, and easily accessible of Earth's fossils-are
also the most important. Their ubiquity is such that every person
on the planet touches or uses them every single day, and yet few of
us even realize they exist. Despite being the sole witnesses of 3
billion years of evolutionary history, these diminutive fungi,
plants, and animals are themselves invisible to the eye. In this
microscopic bestiary, prominent geologist, paleontologist, and
scholar Patrick De Wever lifts the veil on their mysterious world.
Marvelous Microfossils lays out the basics of what microfossils are
before moving on to the history, tools, and methods of
investigating them. The author describes the applications of their
study, both practical and sublime. Microfossils, he explains, are
indispensable in age-dating and paleoenvironmental reconstruction,
which guide enormous investments in the oil, gas, and mining
industries. De Wever shares surprising stories of how microfossils
made the Chunnel possible and have unmasked perpetrators in jewel
heists and murder investigations. He also reveals that microfossils
created the stunning white cliffs on the north coast of France,
graced the tables of the Medici family, and represent our best hope
for discovering life on the exoplanets at the outer edges of our
solar system. Describing the many strange and beautiful groups of
known microfossils in detail, De Wever combines lyrical prose with
hundreds of arresting color images, from delicate
nineteenth-century drawings of phytoplankton drafted by Ernst
Haeckel, the "father of ecology," to cutting-edge scanning electron
microscope photographs of billion-year-old acritarchs. De Wever's
ode to the invisible world around us allows readers to peer
directly into a minute microcosm with massive implications, even
traversing eons to show us how life arose on Earth.
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