A brief guide to the main concepts discussed in the Prologue of "Cradle Of Life"
PROLOGUE
In the Prologue, William Schopf explains what his book, Cradle of Life, is about.
Cradle of Life tells the story of the discovery of a fossil record that for a long time was nowhere to be found, and whose absence had haunted scientists for decades. This newly found fossil record represents 85% of the time during which there has been life on Earth (which, remember, is not the same of the Earth's age).
The discovery of such a fossil record changed forever our understanding of how evolution works.
William Schopf has been one of the most important scientists involved in this line of research during the last few decades. He is currently a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at UCLA.
In this book you will read about his personal experiences in the field, often enthusiastically told in first person. Not only he details the development of this discovery and its enormous importance, but he manages to show us all the excitement and the fun, together with the hard work, that are related to scientific research.
In order to better illustrate the importance of this discovery, Schopf compares the history of life on Earth to the history of the United States from 1776 to 1998 (the year of first publication of this book).
Nobody knew it for sure, but after the discovery of this ancient, previously missing fossil record, it was realized that what we were previously familiar with (which includes fossils of plants and animals such as, fossil shells, trilobites, dinosaurs, ammonites, etc.) was representing only 15% of the total span of life on Earth. By comparison, if we only knew about 15% of the history of the United States, we would have no knowledge of what happened before 1963. We would know that something must have happened, but not exactly what. Discovering the whole history of what happened between 1776 and 1963 would open up a completely new world, and show us the foundation of what we are and see today.
The same thing happened when we first learned about Precambrian life, our previously missing record: a completely different view about our history and past appeared, confirming the theory of evolution and improving our understanding of how life changed over time on our planet.
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