The Evolution of Plants

Well, I finished the book. Concerning actual plant species and families, it's a decent collation of stuff which I mostly knew already, with not all that much detail on prehistoric plants really, and no real descriptive species-level stuff after the Palaeozoic. There is no "scene-setting" or imaginative, immersive style of writing to help you imagine things. Printing off Wikipedia articles will give you more of that. It is more focussed on - well like the title says - the evolution of the plants, what happened, and mostly WHY. There are maybe less than 10 pictures of plant reconstructions (mostly Palaeozoic) but many times more graphs and tables and things. It does a good job of describing the biomes which existed throughout the earth's history; and in stressing that biomes in general don't match the conventional geological periods either. I do wonder whether the prehistoric biome divisions are not massively simplified due to the scarcity of fossil record. It spends a lot of time stressing that the geological periods we are used to have almost nothing to do with plants: family-wide extinctions and the great high-level evolutionary steps of plants do not marry up to the great extinction events for animals, although turnover of species can match but mostly in localised biomes. It looks at climate a lot and is interesting in how it describes the various earth climates at different times. The chapters toward the end, detailing the Cenozoic were comparably more interesting than the Mesozoic ones. It details the spread of grasses especially well, and generalises the climatic trends in the Cenozoic in a way I had not appreciated before. In general, the book tries to collate a lot from many sources without coming down hard with any kind of opinion of its own. It has many interesting things to say about climate, CO2, plate tectonics and biomes. It has a lot of maps, charts and tables just copied in from other sources without much in the way of explanation. It frequently feels more like a survey of the scientific-literature than a book. Charts and maps are all greyscale and it's virtually impossible to really comprehend them at-a-glance because the annotations are not sufficient and the greyscale means you can't readily distinguish what you are supposed to see: charts are supposed to visualise concepts to make them easier and quicker to apprehend, but the ones in this book simply don't usually do that. Just a bit of text saying "this shows x because y" would be nice. Why paste in multiple pages of extended tabulated information if you're not going to really discuss what it means? Also, it has a fair amount of editorial errors: sometimes the sentences don't make complete sense, sometimes they accidentally say the wrong thing (eg. by accidentally stating the wrong period), sometimes the chart or map graphic doesn't say what the text says it does, etc.At the price....... it's not something I'd suggest everyone read however.

This is a truly remarkable book. I'd by hard-pressed to recall a book of such high information density per cubic paper unit. Nor where the information is arranged so logically and accessibly. There is so much more to the book than the evolutionary history of plants. Rather plant evolution becomes a window through which to view geological history and the intimate relation between life and the planetary surface. I'm no botanist but I found the book perfectly approachable. I had to nip off to Wikipedia here and there to remind myself of the occasional taxon or plant or geological feature, which itself is a fun process as it shows just how much information humans have acquired about the deep history of the planet and their ingenuity in decoding the clues embedded in nature all around them. I would say that it pays to learn your geological eons and eras (just keep going back to the diagram on page 2) to help one keep the timeline straight in one's head. I've known for a while that there is more the history of life than dinosaurs romping about in forests of ferns, but this book allows one to vividly picture the many phases of the development of life on earth. Marvellous book.

A three star book for biology novices and a five star book for the more expert who are familiar with botanical terms.Answers so many questions I have asked myself over the years.If you buy other books they will not tell the story of plants in each of the geological ages as well as this book does.It is quiet amazing what scientists of all disciplines have been able to deduce about plant life that existed an unimaginably long time ago.You will be very well versed on evolution and earth sciences if you take in all that is on offer in this tome.

Very authoritative - very technical - very highly referenced (every couple of sentences) - lots of botanical jargon. Perhaps too much, even for the evolutionarily savvy enthusiastic horticultural botanist. Surprisingly, doesn't mention the evolution of chlorophyll nor its very close similarity to hemoglobin.

This is the definitive book on the subject, a huge advance on what was known a few years ago. Weak glossary though.

Well documented account of the plant cycle and factors affecting that change .A very worthwhile read for all with an interest in the Evolution Theory .

a good book for the plant fossil collector

It is an indispensable book for students of plants evolution. I read the first edition several years ago, and the new one is considerably extended.