Overview

In a desert that was once an ocean, 35 fossilized bodies waited patiently for 250 million years to tell their story. It is the story of quantum speciation, or biodiversity explosion events, that abruptly, and seemingly out of nowhere, filled the earth with a wide range of biodiverse life forms. Biodiversity explosion events have remained one of our greatest planetary mysteries because of the lack of hard evidence as to how they occurred. These 35 fossilized bodies tell the story of how this occurred in one such event 250 million years ago. This in not just their story. This is the story of all of us. The book takes a detective's approach to reviewing this new evidence and identifies a previously unknown suspect that had the means, motive, and opportunity to cause the biodiversity explosion event. The evidence indicates the suspect used a genetic reassortment process to perpetrate the biodiversity explosion. The life forms spawned by the event span the range from unicellular giants to forerunners of dinosaurs and mammals, as well as life forms that never made it into earth's playbook of life. The exceptional level of internal soft tissue preservation shows the appearance of specialized cell types such as optic and olfactory neurons. Undigested stomach contents reveal that predators were also created as part of this process. Life forms with features suited for migration onto land ( e.g. reptilian skin, paws, claws, etc...) and forerunners of four legged land animals also appear as part of the mix. The story told by these fossils provides a novel perspective on how life on earth arose, our ancestral origins, and how earth repopulated after one mass extinction event with a new cast of characters that did not resemble what lived prior to the extinction event. This novel perspective is supported by known molecular biology and is documented by the evidence immortalized in these fossils. This novel perspective also has implications for how life may develop on other planets and what it may look like.

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9781494929718

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Mark Zamoyski received his BS in 1977 and MBA in 1978, both from Cornell University (Ag. & Life Sci. and JGSM, respectively). His scientific curiosity in the history of life on earth started several decades ago from fossils prevalent on one of the family properties in Arizona. In 2011, Mark set up specialized equipment to process the fossil collection in his spare time and started evaluating the collection to understand the story it told. The result is this book. In his professional career, Mark has been awarded 15 US patents, most dealing with the molecular biology of disease conditions and novel treatment methods based thereon.

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