Björn recenserade Försvunna världar av Claes Bernes
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4 stjärnor
The basic paradox at the heart of paleontology is that almost everything we know about life comes from death.
There's a poetry in Halliday's plural-of-apocalypse tale of life on Earth, played up backwards from the wooly mammoths to the first precambrian predators. The way he notes that the same mountain range that once, before the Atlantic split it, stretched from Scandinavia to Scotland to the Appalachians, is still united by the sound of fiddles made from trees that still grow there. The way he - to slightly varying degrees of success - puts on an Attenboroughian tone in describing the life of biomes that he will then go on to tell us how they ended. Sic semper Tyrannosaurus. The way he actively encourages the reader to use our Pan Narransian sense of pattern recognition to see where we came from - and all the possibilities that had to disappear …
The basic paradox at the heart of paleontology is that almost everything we know about life comes from death.
There's a poetry in Halliday's plural-of-apocalypse tale of life on Earth, played up backwards from the wooly mammoths to the first precambrian predators. The way he notes that the same mountain range that once, before the Atlantic split it, stretched from Scandinavia to Scotland to the Appalachians, is still united by the sound of fiddles made from trees that still grow there. The way he - to slightly varying degrees of success - puts on an Attenboroughian tone in describing the life of biomes that he will then go on to tell us how they ended. Sic semper Tyrannosaurus. The way he actively encourages the reader to use our Pan Narransian sense of pattern recognition to see where we came from - and all the possibilities that had to disappear for that to happen. Life on Earth is a long story of deaths. Death on Earth is a long story of survival - not of individuals or of species or of entire phyla, but of life. The dinosaurs might have launched a Bruce Willis to blow up the meteor if they'd known how. What's our excuse?