Aquagenesis: The origin and evolution of life in the sea by Richard Ellis,
Viking/Penguin, $25.95, ISBN 0670030236
THEY’RE an opinionated and pugnacious bunch, palaeontologists. Hardly
surprising, really. You need to be a bit of an obsessive to take on more than 3
billion years of evolution. Add in the phonetic mayhem of fossil names to sift,
and you have the ideal subject for Richard Ellis—writer, illustrator and,
his agent says, “fact junkie”.
In Aquagenesis, Ellis turns to the sea to plot life’s evolutionary path from
those early Precambrian beginnings. He follows a slightly erratic path through
ideas and interpretations…
