"For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story. In Beasts Before Us, palaeontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over three-hundred million years ago....

How does the cuckoo get away with laying its eggs in the nests of other birds and tricking them into raising young cuckoos rather than their own offspring? Early observers who noticed a little warbler feeding a monstrously large cuckoo chick concluded the cuckoo's lack of parental care was the result of faulty design by the Creator, and that the hosts chose to help the poor cuckoo. These quaint views of bad design and benevolence were banished after...

Dip below the ocean's surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom - the Metazoa--they can teach us much about the evolutionary...

"This book is about one of the great zoological wonders of the world. No, it's not about the tears of the elephant, the smile of the dolphin, or the politics of the chimpanzee. It is about a scrawny, brainy ape with the habit of helping strangers, at times even risking life and limb to do so. It's about you and me, and how we treat everybody else. In short, it answers one of the biggest questions science has ever faced: Why do we give a damn about...

"A team of neuroscientists uncover amazing new capabilities in the brain that may steer human evolution toward miraculous and deadly frontiers in this spectacular debut work of speculative science fiction--Limitless meets James Rollins--that combines spirituality and science in an inventive, mind-blowing fashion. For decades, scientists have speculated about the untapped potential of the human brain. Now, neuroscientist Chuck Brenton has made an astonishing...

"We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often--two hundred times more often than a dog? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? Why is the vast majority of our genetic code pointless? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake....

Outlines a reassessment of human evolution that draws on recent fossil findings and challenges current theories to say that humans coexisted and competed across the African continent while exchanging genes, tools, and behaviors.

When three of his test subjects take the world hostage, neuroscientist Chuck Brenton, horrified by what he did, comes out of hiding to stop the monsters he created.