*25Some readers may not know that the Blue Lias is a Jurassic formation that crops out on the southern coast of England near Charmouth and is famous for fossils, which Lang wrote about in several publications. Lang’s theory is similar in some respects to that of L. F. Spath (see Chapter 3), who used ammonites as his “experimental material.”
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*26I have over-simplified the Jefferies theory here, which later came to include a wider variety of animals, including an obscure but evolutionarily important group known as the hemichordates.
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*27Molecular evidence can now arbitrate on these cases, and in my experience often seems to find in favour of fine species divisions. There are also increasing numbers of examples of cryptic species, where the molecules are more different than the morphology might indicate. This is particularly the case where populations have been isolated for very long periods of time.
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ALSO BY RICHARD FORTEY
The Hidden Landscape
Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth
Trilobite! Eyewitness to Revolution
Fossils: The Key to the Past
Earth: An Intimate History
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Richard Fortey
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Great Britian by HarperPress, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions from Chapter 7 originally appeared in Orion magazine.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008926695
eISBN: 978-0-307-26940-9
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