Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves

A journey through the great mass extinction events that have shaped our Earth.

Extinctions lays out the latest scientific understanding of mass extinction on our planet. Cutting-­edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction. This compelling evidence, revealing a series of environmental crises resulting in the near collapse of life on Earth, illuminates our current dilemmas in exquisite detail.

Beginning with the oldest, paleontologist Michael J. Benton takes us through the "big five" die outs: the Late Ordovician, which set the evolution of the first animals on an entirely new course; the Late Devonian, apparently brought on by global warming; the cataclysmic End-­Permian, also known as the Great Dying, which wiped out over 90 percent of all life on Earth; the newly discovered Carnian Pluvial Event; and the End-Cretaceous asteroid. He examines how global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification, erupting volcanoes, and meteorite impact have affected conditions on Earth, and how life survived, adapted, and evolved.

Benton’s expert retelling of scientific breakthroughs in paleobiology is illustrated throughout with photographs of fossils and fieldwork, and artistic reconstructions of prehistoric environments. In Extinctions, readers will learn about the revolutionary new tools used to uncover ancient extinction events and processes in forensic detail. As today’s climate scientists and political leaders grapple to understand these processes and our planet enters the sixth great extinction, these insights from the past may hold the key to survival.

70 illustrations, 28 in color

Michael J. Benton is head of the world-­leading Palaeobiology Research Group at the University of Bristol. He has written more than fifty books, including Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World, Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology, and When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time.