The variety of life : a survey and a celebration of all the creatures that have ever lived

著者

• Tudge, Colin

書誌事項

The variety of life : a survey and a celebration of all the creatures that have ever lived

Colin Tudge

Oxford University Press, 2000

注記

Bibliography: p. [629]-684

Includes index

内容説明・目次

内容説明

This volume can be read at many levels. Not least it is an extraordinary inventory - an illustrated summary of all the Earthly creatures that have ever lived. Whatever living thing the reader comes across, from E coli to an oak tree or an elephant, the book aims to show what kind of creature it is, and how it relates to all the others. Yet there are far too many creatures to present merely as a catalogue. The list of species already described is vast enough - nearly two million - but there could in reality be as many as 30 million different animals, plants, fungi and protists - and perhaps another 400 million different bacteria and archaes. In the 4000 million years or so since life first began on Earth, there could have been several thousand billion different species. The only way to keep track of so many is to classify - placing similar creatures into categories, which nest within larger categories, and so on. As the centuries have passed, so it has become clear that the different groups are far more diverse than had ever been appreciated. Thus Linneus in the 18th century placed all living things in just two kingdoms, Animals and Plants.

目次

• Part 1: so many goodly creatures
• classification and the search for order
• the natural order - Darwin's dream and Hennig's solution
• data
• Clade, grade, and a plea for neolinnean impressionism. Part 2: from two kingdoms to three domains
• the domain of the prokaryotes - bacteria and archaea
• the domain on the nucleus - the eucaryota
• mushrooms, moulds and lichens - rusts, smut and rot - the kingdom of the fungi
• the animals - kingdom animalia
• anemones, corals, jellyfish and sea-pens - phylum cnidaria
• clams and cockles, snails and slugs, octopus and squids - phylum mollusca
• animals with jointed legs - phylum anthropoda
• lobsters, crabs, shrimps, barnacles, and many more besides - subphylum crustacea
• the insects - subphylum insecta
• spiders, scorpions, mites, water-scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders - subphylum chelicerata and subphylum pycnogonida
• starfish and brittle stars, sea urchins and sand dollars, sea lilies, sea daisies and sea cucumbers - phylum echinodermata
• sea-squirts, lancelets, and vertebrates - phylum chordata
• sharks, rays and chimaeras: class chondrichthyes
• the ray-finned bony fish - class actinopterygii
• lobefins and tetrapods - the sarcopterygii
• the reptiles - paraphyletic class reptilia
• the mammals - class mammalia
• Lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, monkeys and apes - the order of the primates
• human beings and our immediate relatives - family hominidae
• the birds - class aves
• the modern birds - subclass neornithes
• the plants - kingdom plantae
• the flowering plants - class angiospermae
• daisies, artichokes, thistles and lettuce - family compositae alias asteraceae
• epilogue.

「Nielsen BookData」 より

詳細情報

• NII書誌ID(NCID): BA47005930
• ISBN:
  • 0198503113
• 出版国コード: us
• タイトル言語コード: eng
• 本文言語コード: eng
• 出版地: New York
• ページ数/冊数: xii, 684 p.
• 大きさ: 29 cm
• 分類:
  • DC21 : 578/.01/2