Böcker av Anthony J. Martin

"As the co-discoverer of the first known burrowing dinosaur and a popular science author, Anthony J. Martin is an expert at explaining his fossil-finding work to broad audiences. In this engaging book, Martin uses modern and fossil traces to introduce readers to a menagerie of animals and other lifeforms that dig, crunch, bore, and otherwise reshape our planet. We meet elephants that dig ballroom-sized caves alongside volcanoes, parrotfishes that chew coral reefs and poop out sandy beaches, dinosaur-eating crocodiles, and moon snails that drill into clams, or even other moon snails. In a detective story that spans millions of years, ranging from microbes to whales, Martin shows how when life got hard, life got boring, using bodies and behavior to hide, eat, attack, and defend, affecting both our world and our understanding of evolution, climate, and life itself"--

Have you ever wondered what left behind those prints and tracks on the seashore, or what made those marks or dug those holes in the dunes? Life Traces of the Georgia Coast is an up-close look at these traces of life and the animals and plants that made them. It tells about how the tracemakers lived and how they interacted with their environments. This is a book about ichnology (the study of such traces) and a wonderful way to learn about the behavior of organisms, living and long extinct. Life Traces presents an overview of the traces left by modern animals and plants in this biologically rich region; shows how life traces relate to the environments, natural history, and behaviors of their tracemakers; and applies that knowledge toward a better understanding of the fossilized traces that ancient life left in the geologic record. Augmented by illustrations of traces made by both ancient and modern organisms, the book shows how ancient trace fossils directly relate to modern traces and tracemakers, among them, insects, grasses, crabs, shorebirds, alligators, and sea turtles. The result is an aesthetically appealing and scientifically grounded book that will serve as source both for scientists and for anyone interested in the natural history of the Georgia coast.