Islands in deep time. Ancient landscapes lost and found / Острова в глубокой древности. Потерянные и найденные древние пейзажи

Compared to entire continents, islands are miniature worlds with discrete ecologies that are both more vulnerable to environmental disruption and more fertile as incubators of biological innovation. This book offers excursions to a dozen ancient islands caught in geologic time with relationships exceptionally preserved among fossil plants and animals in the context of the coastal settings they once inhabited. Each chapter includes a topographic map representing the island’s physical structure paired with a global map showing its location in the context of the geography unique to that time. Through succeeding chapters, these maps trace the changing positions of continents and ocean basins beginning five hundred million years ago to the present day. How a given island at a specific spot was buffeted by prevailing winds, waves, and storms that sculpted rocky shores affected the range of marine invertebrates and certain algae best suited to thrive under those conditions. The accompanying narrative provides a guided tour around each island—or, in some cases, over the top of that island—augmented along the way by images detailing fossil finds. The result is a window into the evolving complexity of coastal ecology through time and the ways life spread around the world aided by island stepping stones across the seas of the blue planet we call Earth. <...>