Animals and Plants in Prehistoric Australia and New Zealand
'Reading the Rocks' takes us on a journey through time, re-creating the ancient environments and telling us about the animals and plants that lived in Australia and New Zealand long, long ago. It traces the evolution of living things from the first green cells that, nearly four billion years ago, predetermined the path that evolution would take by creating an oxygenated atmosphere, through all the stages up to the present. We see how environmental change has been the driving force of evolution, and how sudden and rapid changes caused extinction.
The messages about change and extinction that we read in the rocks apply to us in our modern world. Because of our technology and the plague numbers of people that now crowd the Earth, we have become the agents of extinction. Rapid change in the past was measured in geological time and was still too fast; man-made changes are of a different and potentially disastrous dimension. There is no time for species to adapt, so extinction is inevitable . . . and no living species can claim exemption from the laws of Nature which we see applied to the distant past just as they do to the present.
