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Suggested Readings for Hisorical Geology

Earth's and Life's Beginnings

• Vital Dust : Life As a Cosmic Imperative by Christian De Duve (1995)
• How to Build a Habital Planet by Wally Broecker (1985)
• Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Don Brownlee and Peter Ward (2000)
• The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Don Brownlee and Peter Ward (2002)
• The Origins of Life : From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language by John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmary, John Maynard Smith (2000)
• Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earths Earliest Fossils by J. William Schopf (1999)
• The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada (2001)
• Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth by Andrew H. Knoll (2003)
• The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking (2001)
• From Stone to Star: A View of Modern Geology by Claude Allègre (1992)
• Origins: Cosmos, Earth, and Mankind by Dominique Simmonet (1999)
• Atom: An Obyssey from the Big Bang to Life on Earth...and Beyond by Lawrence Krauss (2001)
• Ancient Earth, Ancient Skies: The Age of the Earth and its Cosmic Surroundings by G. Brent Dalrymple (2004)
• Aquagenesis: The Origin and Evolution of Life in the Sea by Richard Ellis (2001)
• Stardust: Supernovae and Life by John and Mary Gribbon (2000)
• Life's Origin: The Beginnings of Biological Evolution edited by William Schopf (2002)
• The Origins of Life and the Universe by Paul Lurquin (2003)
• The Emergence of Life on Earth by Iris Fry (2000)
• Life : A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey (1999)
• Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin by Robert Hazen (2005)
• Evolution: The First Four Billion Years edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis (2009)

Fossils, Life and Evolution

• Wonderful Life : The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould (1989)
• Bully For Brontosaurus: More Reflections In Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
• (Pretty much anything by Stephen Jay Gould would tie in to this class.)
• The Diversity of Life by Edward O. Wilson
• Trilobite : Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey (2000)
• Life : A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey (1999)
• At the Water's Edge : Fish With Fingers, Whales With Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea by Carl Zimmer, Carl Dennis Buell (1998)
• Taking Wing : Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight by Pat Shipman (1998)
• The Crucible of Creation : The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals by Simon Conway Morris (1998)
• Reinventing Darwin : The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory by Niles Eldredge
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins (1996)
• Future Evolution by Peter Douglas Ward and Alexis Rockman (2001)
• The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the First Complex Life by Mark A. S. McMenamin (1998)
• Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer (2001)
• No Turning Back: The Life and Death of Animal Species by Richard Ellis (2004)
• King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon by David Montgomery (2004)
• Discovering Fossil Fishes by John Maisey (1996)
• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins (2004)
• Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution by David Rains Wallace (2004)
• Fossils: The key to the Past by Richard Fortey (2002)
• In the Blink of an Eyeby Andrew Parker (2003)
• The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms by Connie Barlow (2000)
• Sea Dragons: Predators of the Prehistoric Seas by Richard Ellis (2003)
• The Monkey's Bridge" Mysteries of Evolution in Central America by David Rains Wallace (1997)

Dinosaurs and Extinctions

• Rivers in Time : The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions by Peter Douglas Ward
• On Methuselah's Trail : Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions by Peter Douglas Ward (1992)
• The End of Evolution : A Journey in Search of Clues to the Third Mass Extinction Facing Planet Earth by Peter Ward (1994)
• Extinction : Bad Genes or Bad Luck? by David M. Raup (1991)
• The End of the Dinosaurs : Chicxulub Crater and Mass Extinctions by Charles Frankel
• The Mistaken Extinction : Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds by Lowell Dingus, Timothy Rowe (1998)
• The Dinosaur Heresies : New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction by Robert T. Bakker
• Night Comes to the Cretaceous : Comets, Craters, Controversy, and the Last Days of the Dinosaurs by James Lawrence Powell
• The Scientific American Book of Dinosaurs by Gregory s Paul (Editor) (2001)
• T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez (1997)
• Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe by Martin Lockley and Christian Meyer (2000)
• Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science by Deborah Cadbury
• The Bonehunters' Revenge : Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age by David Rains Wallace
• The Gilded Dinosaur : The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science by Mark Jaffe
• Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs by Ed Heck (Illustrator), Michael J. Novacek (1996)
• Digging Dinosaurs : The Search That Unraveled the Mystery of Baby Dinosaurs by John R. Horner, et al (1988)
• Dinosaur Lives by John Horner and Edwin Dobb (1997)
• dinosaurs Under the Big Sky by Jack Horner (2001)
• Gorgon: Paleontology, Obsession, and the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth History by Peter D. Ward (2004)
• When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Extinction of All Time by Michael Benton (2003)
• Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin (2008)

Ice Ages

• The Ice Finders : How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age by Edmund Blair Bolles
• Ice Ages : Solving the Mystery by John Imbrie, Kathrine Palmer Imbrie, Katherine P. Imbrie
• The Two-Mile Time Machine by Richard B. Alley (2000)
• The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850 by Brian M. Fagan (2000)
• The Call of Distant Mammoths : Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared by Peter Douglas Ward (1997)
• Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant by Richard Stone
• After the Ice Age : The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou
• The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change by Paul Andrew Mayewski, et al (2002)
• Cataclysms on the Columbia : A Layman's Guide to the Features Produced by the Catastrophic Bretz Floods in the Pacific Northwest by John Eliot Allen, et al
• Glacial Lake Missoula and its Humongous Floods by David Alt (2001)
• Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe that Spawned Life as We Know It by Gabrielle Walker (2003)

Geologic History

• Earth: An Intimate History by Richard Fortey (2004)
• In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee
• Assembling California by John McPhee
• Rising from the Plains by John McPhee
• Basin and Range by John McPhee
• Annals of the Former World by John A. McPhee (This one is a compilation of the previous 4 John McPhee Books.)
• The Control of Natureby John McPhee (1989)
• Time Machines : Scientific Explorations in Deep Time by Peter Douglas Ward (1998)
• In Search of Deep Time : Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life by Henry Gee
• The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples by Tim Flannery (2001)
• Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes by Simon Lamb (2004)

Misc. (Mostly History of Geology)

• The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester (2001)
• The Dating Game : One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth by Cherry Lewis (2000)
• Aeons: The search for the Beginning of Time by Martin Gorst (2001)
• Plate Tectonics: An Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth by Naomi Oreskes (2001)
• Melting the Earth : The History of Ideas on Volcanic Eruptions by Haraldur Sigurdsson (1999)
• Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky (2002)
• Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester (2003)
• The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity by Jack Repcheck (2003)
• Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time by Stephen Baxter (2003)
• The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discoverd a New History of the Earth by Alan Cutler (2003)
• Naked Earth: The New Geophysics by Shawna Vogel (1996)

Other Books of Interest (but NOT Suitable for the Book Review Project)

• Common Fossil Plants of Western North America by William Tidwell (1998)
• West Coast Fossils: A Guide to the Ancient Life of Vancouver Island by Rolf Ludvigsen and Graham Beard (1997)
• Life in Stone: A Natural History of British Columbia's Fossils by Rolf Ludvigsen (1996)
• No Stone Unturned : Reasoning About Rocks and Fossils by E. K. Peters (1991)
• Ice Age mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre by Ian M. Lange (2002)
• A Short History of Planet Earth : Mountains, Mammals, Fire and Ice (Wiley Popular Series) by J. D. MacDougall (1996)
• Stepping Stones: The Making of Our Homeword by Stephen Drury (1999)

Last Updated Tuesday, February 10, 2009