For billions of years after the birth of the earth, this planet was too harsh. Rippling seas, volcanic eruptions, constant changes in the atmosphere. Life has repeated extinction and evolution while facing all kinds of difficulties. Life persisted until the spread of Homo sapiens. “The birth of the earth” to “the extinction of sapiens, the extinction of life” is condensed into one volume.Supercompression Complete history of life on earth]depicts the story of that miracle. Jared Diamond (Author of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”) wrote “The author presents an exciting picture of life changing like a kaleidoscope. A book for everyone to enjoy!”, etc., are recommended by the world’s leading experts.this bookIn commemoration of the publication of , a part of the contents will be specially released.
Problems with giant creatures
Volume increases much faster than surface area as the body grows while maintaining its shape. In other words, when the body becomes gigantic, the inside of the body becomes much larger than the surface of the body.
Therefore, in addition to obtaining the food, water, and oxygen that the body needs, problems such as excretion of waste products and generation of heat due to digestion of food arise just by living.
This is because the area available for loading and unloading substances is reduced compared to the volume of body tissue.
Many creatures are tiny, so this problem doesn’t arise, but for creatures larger than the punctuation marks on this page, it becomes a problem.
two solutions
The solution to this problem is to first evolve systems specialized for transportation, such as blood vessels and lungs. The second is to create extensions and intricate systems that act as radiators by altering body shape.
Examples include the sails of pelycosaurus (pericosaurus), the ears of elephants, and the complex structures inside the lungs, which perform the important function of dissipating excess heat as well as gas exchange.
When mammals are freed from the world dominated by dinosaurs and can grow to a size greater than that of a badger, as they grow, their body hair becomes thin and difficult to see, and they sweat to solve this heat dissipation problem. Settled.
long tongue wet with sweat
Sweat secretes fluid onto the surface of the skin.
As it evaporates, it takes the energy needed to turn liquid sweat into gas from the tiny blood vessels just below the skin, producing a cooling effect. for this reason). The air exhaled from the lungs also takes heat.
This is why furry mammals expose their long, wet tongues and gasp as they evaporate moisture into the air.
biggest dinosaur
The largest terrestrial mammal on land was the tall, lanky, hornless relative of the rhinoceros, the Paraceratherium. It was about 4 meters high at the shoulder and weighed 20 tons.
But the largest dinosaur was much, much bigger than that.
At 70 tons and 30 meters long, giant sauropods such as Argentinosaurus were among the largest land animals to ever exist, but their surface area was insignificant compared to their volume.
Even changing the body shape by lengthening the neck and tail was not enough to dissipate the heat generated from the large body.
Dinosaurs in the sun…
Although sauropods were very large, they generally had lower body temperatures because larger animals generally tend to have slower metabolisms than smaller ones.
It took a dinosaur this size a long time to warm up in the sun, but it took just as long to cool down, so once it warmed up, it lost a lot of body heat simply because it was so big. could be kept constant.
legacy of dinosaurs
However, the dinosaurs were able to protect themselves and grow to this size because of their inherited heritage.
The dinosaur’s lungs were already large and extended to a system of air sacs that stretched all over the body, so they weighed less than they appeared.
Also, the skeleton was light because of the air sacs in the bones. The skeletons of the largest dinosaurs were the result of bioengineering, in which the bones were a collection of hollow weight-bearing struts with as little non-weight-bearing space as possible.
great benefit
Importantly, the air sac’s internal system did more than draw heat from the lungs.
This internal system allows heat to be removed directly from the internal organs, without the complex process of first carrying heat through the blood, then to the lungs, and dissipating some of the heat along the way. was made.
A big beneficiary was the liver, which produced a lot of heat and was the size of a car in large dinosaurs. Dinosaurs’ air-cooled internal systems were more efficient than liquid-cooled mammalian systems.
Dinosaur successor
This allowed dinosaurs to grow much larger than mammals without being boiled alive.
The Argentinosaurus was more of an agile, quadrupedal, flightless… bird than a burly behemoth.
After all, the successors of dinosaurs are birds, which also have lightweight structures, active metabolisms and air-cooled systems.
(This manuscript was written by Henry Gee“Ultra-compressed life history of the earth”Excerpt from )
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“Ultra-compressed life history of the earth”presents the entire history from “the birth of the earth” to “the extinction of sapiens, the extinction of life”. Please check it.
Senior Editor, Nature
Former professor at the University of California. Born in London in 1962. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. His specialties are paleontology and evolutionary biology. Since 1987 he has been an editor of the scientific journal Nature, where he is currently the senior editor of biology. However, his working style is more of a participant than a director, contributing to numerous paleontological discoveries, including feathered dinosaurs and the earliest fish. He has appeared as an expert on television and radio, and has produced a program called the BBC World Science Service.
Translated by: Kaoru Takeuchi
Born in Tokyo in 1960. He is a doctor of science and a science writer. He graduated from the College of Liberal Arts and Science at the University of Tokyo, and completed a doctoral course at McGill University. He is active in a wide range of fields, including novels, essays, and translations. Main translations include “Why are the beginning and end of the universe the same?” (Roger Penrose, Shinchosha), “WHOLE BRAIN: How to move your brain to make your mind lighter” (Jill Bolt Taylor, NHK Publishing). , WHAT IS LIFE?
Understanding the history of life on Earth will change the way we see the world–From the translator
As the name suggests, by Henry Gee, the biology editor of the world-renowned scientific journal Nature (originally a scientist specializing in paleontology and evolutionary biology),Supercompression Complete history of life on earthis. When I first got my hands on the original, I remember being surprised at how reckless the attempt was.
After all, no one could have imagined that writing about 3.8 billion years of life on earth from its birth to its extinction (?) in just 200 pages (original) was an impossible task.
I thought it would take me a long time to finish reading it, since it was a history book about an eternity of time. However, it was recommended by world-famous non-fiction writer and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond (“Guns, Germs, and Steel” translated by Akira Kurabotsu, Soshisha Bunko), so I began to turn the pages. be.
When you actually start readingMysteriously, I fell into the illusion that a dynamic image of life’s birth, evolution, and extinction was flowing before my eyes, and I wanted to read more and more. My reading speed accelerated, and before I knew it, I was finished reading in just a few hours.
It left me with a fresh surprise and excitement, as if I had traveled through 4.6 billion years in a time machine.
Literature can change your life, butthis bookis the same.When you learn the story of the birth and extinction of life on earth, you will think deeply about oil, global warming, endangered species, jaws, ears, menopause, etc., and the way you see the world will change. It’s life changing.
Information on newly published books
Jared Diamond (Author of Guns, Germs and Steel)
“This book is the best book currently available about the profound changes that have happened to our planet and its inhabitants during the billions of years since the Earth was born. The author is kaleidoscopic. An exciting depiction of the changing nature of life, this is a book that all mankind can enjoy!」
Daniel E. Lieberman (Professor of Biological Sciences, Harvard University, author of Six Million Years of the Human Body)
“A delightful, concise and epic masterpiece that cannot be overlooked. The author condenses all the improbable and astonishing histories of life on Earth with charm, lightness, scientific accuracy and admiration.” I couldn’t let go of this book, and neither can you.”