I had planned to get at least 20 pages finished today, but I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. As it stands now I've got 15 pages, much of it brand new material, but after taking the bus home I have a splitting headache. Sitting on a bus during rush hour in New Brunswick means that you will be subjected to many short stops and starts (particularly since there's only a crowded, single-lane main road between campuses), and by the time I get home I usually want to sit down and not get up.
Still, I more than doubled my output from yesterday, and I have a good feeling that I will be able to have the chapter reasonably completed by the end of the month. I'm going to have to lose a lot of material, particularly about T.H. Huxley, but I do not have much of a choice. If I kept everything I want to the chapters would be small books by themselves, and I am trying to keep things relatively slim (my goal is for the book to be about 250 pages when complete, and certainly not more than 300 pages).
Despite my gripes, I am happy to say that I came across a hard-to-find poem by a paleontologist today. Here is a snippet of the verses I stumbled upon (I'm sure some of you will be able to figure out who wrote the lines fairly easily);
Bird of sandstone era, wake!
From thy deep dark prison break
Spread they wings upon our air,
Show thy huge strong talons here:
Let them print the muddy shore
As they did in days of yore.
Pre-adamic bird, whose sway
Ruled creation in thy day
Come obedient to my word,
Stand before Creation's Lord.
I am going to have to do a bit more research on how the "pseudosuchians" fit into concepts of bird evolution, but overall I have a fairly strong idea of how the rest of the chapter is going to be constructed. (I also have to get in touch with the folks at Amherst about a particular variety of fossil footprint that exhibit some curious impressions. I suspect that my query won't turn up much, but I would rather ask and have my idea crushed than be silent and miss out on an important bit of information.) Much like the chapter on human evolution, there is far more material present that I am going to be able to discuss, but by keeping the subject somewhat narrowly defined to the transition from dinosaurs to birds I think I can hit my mark.
Indeed, throughout the writing process I have tried to put major evolutionary transitions first and foremost. Rather than review every single evolutionary step from one group of animals to their modern representatives, I have focused on the actual transitions between groups. This means that australopithecenes, archaeocetes, feathered dinosaurs, early proboscideans, etc. are going to feature more prominently than their later relatives (although such later relatives will not by any means be ignored). Without these guidelines each chapter would balloon into book length and contain an assortment of dead ends, and to reach my goal of helping the reader understand the fact and theory of evolution I decided to focus on major transitions that connect what today might be disparate groups.
Here is the latest World for the birds/dinosaurs chapter;
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For previous book updates, see the "Books" archive.
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