A magisterial exploration of the natural history of the first four thousand million years of life on and in the earth, by one of Britain's most dazzling science writers.

What do any of us know about the history of our planet before the arrival of man? Most of us have a dim impression of a swirling mass of dust solidifying to form a volcanic globe, briefly populated by dinosaurs, then by woolly mammoths and finally by our own hairy ancestors.

This book, aimed at the curious and intelligent but perhaps mildly uninformed reader, brilliantly dispells such lingering notions forever.

It guides us from the barren globe spinning through space, through the very earliest signs of life on the rims of volcanoes, the appearance of cells, the creation of an atmosphere and the myriad forms of plants and animals (happily including dinosaurs) which could then evolve and be sustained, right up to the first appearance of man.

Richard Fortey ranges across a great multiplicity of scientific disciplines analysing findings and arguments about the origins of life, the causes of extinctions and the first appearance of man, in a wonderfully clear and refreshing way. At the end of the book we understand the complexity of the history of life on earth, and the complexity of how it has come to be understood, as perhaps, from no other single volume.

But it is not simply what Richard Fortey has to tell us that makes this book so distinctive. His grasp of the significant detail and his power of allusion mark him as one of the finest scientific explicators. This book entertains as much as it informs. The result if enthralling.