Clique em uma foto para ir ao Google Livros
|
Carregando... Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrates (1965)de Ralph Buchsbaum
   Nenhum(a) Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  name99 | Apr 11, 2007 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Animals Without Backbones has been considered a classic among biology textbooks since it was first published to great acclaim in 1938. It was the first biology textbook ever reviewed by Time and was also featured with illustrations in Life. Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and more than eighty other colleges and universities adopted it for use in courses. Since then, its clear explanations and ample illustrations have continued to introduce hundreds of thousands of students and general readers around the world to jellyfishes, corals, flatworms, squids, starfishes, spiders, grasshoppers, and the other invertebrates that make up ninety-seven percent of the animal kingdom. This new edition has been completely rewritten and redesigned, but it retains the same clarity and careful scholarship that have earned this book its continuing readership for half a century. It is even more lavishly illustrated than earlier editions, incorporating many new drawings and photographs. Informative, concise legends that form an integral part of the text accompany the illustrations. The text has been updated to include findings from recent research. Eschewing pure morphology, the authors use each group of animals to introduce one or more biological principles. In recent decades, courses and texts on invertebrate zoology at many universities have been available only for advanced biology majors specializing in this area. The Third Edition of Animals Without Backbones remains an ideal introduction to invertebrates for lower-level biology majors, nonmajors, students in paleontology and other related fields, junior college and advanced high school students, and the general reader who pursues the rewarding study of the natural world. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
Current DiscussionsNenhum(a)Capas populares
 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)592Natural sciences and mathematics Zoology InvertebratesClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.77)
É você?Torne-se um autor do LibraryThing. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1
It does a pretty good job of explaining the phyla, their known relationships, the anatomy and embryology of each phylum, and the different lifestyles of different members.
The book is not perfect. One problem is hardly the book's fault; I kept wanting to know more, in greater detail --- what are the detailed relationships between the phyla, how did they evolve, how is some embryology so different from other --- and right now no-one really knows the answers to these questions.
A second problem is that the book shows its heritage as a venerable (first edn 1937) textbook, with simple line drawings and black-and-white photos. The drawings and the photos are, I will be the first to admit, very good, but there were at least a few diagrams I could not fully understand (especially the discussion of snail anatomy and how everything fits into the shell), and I think color pictures would have given a rather more accurate view of the reality of these animals.
One issue I've never seen much commented on is the great disparity between sea life and land life, in that while plants are obviously very prominent on land, they are much less
so in the ocean. You have your bazillions of cyanobacteria, of course, and your kelp, but what one sees covering surfaces is sponges, coral, bryozoa and various other weird things that look like plants to naive eye.
It's not clear to me why there should be this strange disparity. Obviously plants can't grow below, what, maybe 100 feet or so that will block out the light, but that still leaves an awful lot of apparent space for them.
My suspicion is that this is an example of history, not inevitability, that animals got there first and, once established, out-compete any interloper from the plant (or fungal) world. But I really need to learn more about both plants and fungi before I can say anything useful on the subject. (