Cambrian Ocean World

Ancient Sea Life of North America (Life of the Past Series)

By: John Foster

Narrated by: David Stifel

This volume, aimed at the general audience, presents life and times of the amazing animals that inhabited Earth more than 500 million years ago. The Cambrian Period was a critical time in Earth's history. During this immense span of time nearly every modern group of animals appeared. Although life had been around for more than 2 million millennia, Cambrian rocks preserve the record of the first appearance of complex animals with eyes, protective skeletons, antennae, and complex ecologies. Grazing, predation, and multi-tiered ecosystems with animals living in, on, or above the sea floor became common. The cascade of interaction led to an ever-increasing diversification of animal body types. By the end of the period, the ancestors of sponges, corals, jellyfish, worms, mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, echinoderms, and vertebrates were all in place. The evidence of this Cambrian "explosion" is preserved in rocks all over the world, including North America, where the seemingly strange animals of the period are preserved in exquisite detail in deposits such as the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Cambrian Ocean World tells the story of what is, for us, the most important period in our planet's long history.

©2014 John Foster (P)2022 Tantor

Superb Adjunct to Cambrian Paleontology Textbook

I purchased this Audible version of the book to use as an adjunct to the Kindle version of the textbook. The Kindle version of the book is necessary to get the most satisfying use out of the audiobook.

This book focuses on paleontology of the Cambrian period. It describes the fossils found in geologic strata that formed at ocean sites off the Paleozoic continent of Laurentia which formed the geologic core of North America. The Cambrian Radiation in these oceans over 53 million years led from simple sponges and metazoan colonies in the Ediacaran period to the development of every major body plan or Phylum of animal that is on Earth today. These newly formed life forms were fossilized to varying degrees in the shale and limestone that formed at Cambrian fossil sites in North America such as the Burgess Shale deposit in British Columbia and the Wheeler formation in Utah.

I listened to large sections of the book as an audiobook at 1.35x speed and looked at the images and other supportive material while listening. The narrator does an excellent job. For many of the sections, it was like attending lectures by a really great college professor with superb speaking and teaching ability. The narrator’s delivery helped me with pronunciations of many of the fossil names and also helped me enjoy many of the self-deprecating and other humorous comments that the author makes amid highly technical passages. Sitting back and listening to the narration of author’s descriptions of his trips to remote, arid stratigraphy sites in Nevada and California was like being there.

I am a retired educator with degrees in the biological sciences and have recently become a self-taught student of geology. Reading and listening to this book was a wonderful paleontology learning experience for me. I have submitted a separate book review of the Kindle version on the Amazon site.

Useless without a PDF of the illustrations

The print version apparently has tons of photos and illustrations that directly relate to the fauna being described in exquisite detail. Without the visuals there is no context for the differences among species or of all the many animals found in different rock layers. It's a good book, but I returned the audiobook and will get the print version.

This is unreadable

Maybe this is a textbook but is not written to be read. Unless you like a million very large names