Life on Earth
Описание книги
A new, beautifully illustrated edition of David Attenborough’s groundbreaking Life on Earth.David Attenborough’s unforgettable meeting with gorillas became an iconic moment for millions of television viewers. Life on Earth, the series and accompanying book, fundamentally changed the way we view and interact with the natural world setting a new benchmark of quality, influencing a generation of nature lovers.Told through an examination of animal and plant life, this is an astonishing celebration of the evolution of life on earth, with a cast of characters drawn from the whole range of organisms that have ever lived on this planet. Attenborough’s perceptive, dynamic approach to the evolution of millions of species of living organisms takes the reader on an unforgettable journey of discovery from the very first spark of life to the blue and green wonder we know today.Now, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the book’s first publication, David Attenborough has revisited Life on Earth, completely updating and adding to the original text, taking account of modern scientific discoveries from around the globe. He has chosen beautiful, completely new photography, helping to illustrate the book in a much greater way than was possible forty years ago.This special anniversary edition provides a fitting tribute to an enduring wildlife classic, destined to enthral the generation who saw it when first published and bring it alive for a whole new generation.
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Cover
Title Page
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Life remained at this stage of development for a vast period. Then, around 2 billion years ago one single-celled life form found itself trapped inside another, in an entirely chance encounter. You can find examples of the kind of organisms it eventually produced in almost any patch of fresh water.
A drop from a pond, viewed through a microscope, swarms with tiny organisms, some spinning, some crawling, some whizzing across the field of vision like rockets. As a group they are often called the protozoa, or protists – the name means ‘first animals’, although they are now seen as a very disparate group, not all of which have any affinity with animals. They are all single cells, yet within their cell walls they contain much more complex structures than any bacterium possesses. One central packet, the nucleus, is full of DNA. This appears to be the organising force of the cell. Elongated bodies, the mitochondria, provide energy by burning oxygen in much the same way as many bacteria do. Many cells have a thrashing tail attached to them and this resembles a filamentous bacterium called a spirochete. Some also contain chloroplasts, packets of chlorophyll which, like blue-greens, use the energy of sunlight to assemble complex molecules as food for the cell. Each of these tiny organisms thus appears to be a committee of simpler ones. This, in effect, is what they are. The mitochondria are the descendants of the single-celled organism that was trapped some 2 billion years ago, say in June in the year of life, while the chloroplasts are descended from a trapped blue-green.
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