Evolving Animals : The Story of Our Kingdom (Hardcover)

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. What is an animal?; 2. Before there were animals; 3. How to make a fossil; 4. The Cambrian explosion; 5. How to make a species; 6. Jellyfish and their kin; 7. How to make a tree; 8. The enigmatic urbilaterian; 9. Animal symmetry and heads; 10. A plethora of worms; 11. Trends in animal complexity; 12. Where the octopus is king; 13. How to make an animal; 14. Exoskeletons galore; 15. Extinction; 16. Mouth first, mouth second; 17. Comparing embryos; 18. Larvae, mouthparts and moulting; 19. The animal toolkit; 20. Vertebrate origins and evolution; 21. From water to land to water; 22. Variation and inheritance; 23. Evolutionary novelties; 24. Human origins and evolution; 25. Animal plasticity; 26. The nature of adaptation; 27. The direction of evolution; 28. Animal extremophiles; 29. Extraterrestrial animals?; 30. The ghost in the machine; Appendix; References; Index.