When you agreed to be an impartial civilian participant on this voyage, you where just hoping to get a cheap flight home. But once you saw this beautiful planet, you couldn’t help but get involved. P-L5 was everything you had always dreamed of as a kid in the closed-in metropolises of Earth. Compared to Earth this place was the Garden of Eden. Fresh air, open space, plenty of land. Houses! Real houses, like in your Grandma’s old photos--no dirty tenements and 70-story complexes. Some of the other crew members worried about "alien monsters" and things, but all it turned out to be was a couple of sea predators and simple trilobites. What were they compared to the viruses, animals and gangs that ravaged Earth? You have less than two days to learn enough about evolutionary biology to convince a panel of judges that P-L5 should be colonized. Luckily, you stole Jay’s biology computer counsel and read the following sources:
Leads and Sources
Magazines and Articles:
"When Life Exploded," J. Madeleine Nash. Cover Story Time Magazine December 4, 1995.
"On Embryos and Ancestors," Stephen Jay Gould. Natural History 7/98-8/98, p. 20.
"The Evolution of Life on the Earth," Stephen Jay Gould. Scientific American October 1994, p. 85.
"Breathing Room for Early Animals" (Oxygen), Andrew H. Knoll. Nature Vol. 382, July 11, 1996, p. 111.
"The Big Bang of Animal Evolution," Jeffrey Levinton. Scientific American November 1992.
"Hypersea," Dianna and Mark McMenamin. Discover October 1995, p. 76.
"The Emergence of Animals," Mark McMenamin. Scientific American April 1987, p. 94.
"Life’s Grand Explosions." (theories on why the Cambrian explosion occurred), Lori Oliwenstein. Discover January 1996, p. 42.
"The Molecular Explosion," Henry Gee. Nature Vol. 373, February 16,1995, p. 558.
Internet Sites:
The Divisions of Precambrian Time
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/precambrian.htmlLife of the Vendian
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/vendianlife.htmlLearning About the Vendian Animals
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vendian/critters.htmlOxygen Pulse and the Evolutionary Expansion of the Metazoans
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/8200/Oxygenation.htmlCambrian Explosion
http://www.carleton.ca/Museum/camex/1ahome.html
Books:
The Emergence of Animals: The Cambrian Breakthrough. Mark and Dianna McMenamin, 1990, Columbia University Press.
Biology: The Science of Life. Wallace, Sanders and Ferl, 4th ed., 1996, Addison-Wesley.