Earth history is divided into two great parts: an initial four billion years of ‘cryptozoic’ pre-Cambrian time, followed by the half billion or so years of the Phanerozoic. With its conspicuous fossil record documenting both time and evolutionary trajectories it is of course the latter bit that attracts the attention of most palaeontologists, but any real understanding of life on Earth requires a substantially longer view. Indeed, the premise of Life on a Young Planet is that the Phanerozoic is sufficiently familiar to ignore, at least for the moment. The real question is how our modern world of macroscopic organisms...
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