With the launch of Mariner 2 to Venus in August 1962, for the first time man reached beyond the confines of Earth to explore the rest of the solar system. The two decades that followed have appropriately been called the Golden Age of Planetary Exploration, for a succession of ever more sophisticated spacecraft has been sent throughout the solar system, visiting every planet as far out as Saturn. One spacecraft, Pioneer 10, has even left the solar system and is at the start of an endless journey through interstellar space.

The concept of the adaptive landscape is the creation of the great American geneticist Sewall Wright who, along with the equally great British scientists R. A. Fisher and J.B. S. Haldane, crafted the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolutionary theory in the 1930s. The metaphor of the adaptive landscape, that evolution via the process of natural selection could be visualized as a journey across adaptive hills and valleys, mountains and ravines, permeated both evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science through the succeeding years of the twentieth century. Yet critics of the adaptive landscape concept have maintained that the concept is of heuristic value only; that is, it is fine for creating conceptual models, but that you cannot actually use the concept in analysing the evolution of actual animals or plants. That criticism became invalid in the year 1966 when the palaeontologist David M. Raup used computer simulations to model hypothetical life forms that have never existed in the evolution of life on Earth, and who subsequently created the concept of the theoretical morphospace.

The focus of this book is to demonstrate to the reader the power of the adaptive landscape concept in understanding the process of evolution, and to demonstrate that the adaptive landscape concept can be put into actual analytical practice through the usage of theoretical morphospaces. The adaptive landscape concept allows us to visualize the possible effects of natural selection through simple spatial relationships, rather than complicated modelling of changing environmental or ecological conditions. For that reason, this book relies heavily on spatial graphics to convey the concepts developed within these pages, and less so on formal mathematics.

I thank the Santa Fe Institute for the invitation to visit and work on computational methods in theoretical morphology in 2000, for it was at the Santa Fe Institute that the idea of writing this book came to me in conversations with Dave Raup. I thank the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research for the Fellowship that enabled me to work at the institute in 2005, for it was there that I developed many of the ideas presented in Chapters 7 and 8 of this book. Finally, I thank my wife, Marae, for her patient love.

The Geotraveller describes the geology of famous geosites and areas of archaeological and historical interest from the USA, Africa, and Europe. Geological descriptions are supported by simplified geological maps and colour photographs. Many of the geosites occur in national parks and  reserves, some of which have been upgraded to world heritage sites, while others are located in newly formed geoparks. A Geopark is a unified area that advances the protection and use of geological heritage in a sustainable way and promotes the economic well-being of the people who live there (definition from Wikipedia). There are Global Geoparks and National Geoparks. Many of the geosites not located in parks or reserves could be protected as areas of special interest. The creation of geoparks in areas of outstanding natural landforms is indicative of a growing interest in geological heritage and geotourism <...>

The Guelb Moghrein deposit is located within the Mauritanide Mobile Zone, north east of Nouakchott in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, West Africa. The copper, gold and iron deposits of the Maurilanides fold/thrust belt of the Akjoujt area have many of the characteristics of the hydrothermal iron oxide copper-gold class of deposits as well as showing distinctive features of their own. Exploration by General Gold International SA since 1994 has concluded that they represent, perhaps, a carbonate-rich sub class and show considerable diversity of form and setting.

The Mauritanides in Mauritania incorporate a great diversity of rocks in multiple, thrust-bounded domains including metamorphosed siliciclastic sediments, meta-felsic volcanics, meta-basic volcanics, serpentinite, and bodies of granitoid rocks.