The Evolutionary Biology of Extinct and Extant Organisms

About this book

The Evolutionary Biology of Extinct and Extant Organisms offers a thorough and detailed narration of the journey of biological evolution and its major transitional links to the biological world, which began with paleontological exploration of extinct organisms and now carries on with reviews of phylogenomic footprint reviews of extant, living fossils. This book moves through the defining evolutionary stepping stones starting with the evolutionary changes in prokaryotic, aquatic organisms over 4 billion years ago to the emergence of the modern human species in Earth's Anthropocene.

The book begins with an overview of the processes of evolutionary fitness, the epicenter of the principles of evolutionary biology. Whether through natural or experimental occurrence, evolutionary fitness has been found to be the cardinal instance of evolutionary links in an organism between its ancestral and contemporary states. The book then goes on to detail evolutionary trails and lineages of groups of organisms including mammalians, reptilians, and various fish. The final section of the book provides a look back at the evolutionary journey of "nonliving" or extinct organisms, versus the modern-day transition to "living" or extant organisms.

The Evolutionary Biology of Extinct and Extant Organisms is the ideal resource for any researcher or advanced student in evolutionary studies, ranging from evolutionary biology to general life sciences.

Contents

Introduction: Missing-link: When an "outmoded term", holds "in between features" between the ancestors and its descendants

1. The transitional features of "Missing-link" illuminate the molecular nuts and bolts of biological evolution
2. If and When Evolution is Ultimate Essence of Life: What is the Evolutionary Identity of the Missing-link (resembling Archaeopteryx)
3. Walking with Cynodont to Explore the Uncharted Evolutionary Trail of Mammalian lineage diverged out of Reptilian
4. One Small Step for Amphibious Fish, One Evolutionary Leap for Moving Tetrapods on Earth
5. Evolutionary Origin of Amniotic Egg: The Transitional Form between Amphibians and Reptiles in the Doubt Clear Session
6. When Contemporary Discoveries Pushes the Bony-fish to Ancestral or Evolutionary Back-seat and Discreetly Pushes Cartilaginous-fish in the Advanced or Front-seat
7. Hemichordates: The Bilaterian lineage (also known as phylum Deuterostome) in the evolutionary crossroads of developmental biology
8. Cambrian Evolution of Onychophorans: In the evolutionary labyrinth of Arthropods, Annelids, and Molluscs
9. The extent of Ctenophore uniqueness - distinctly recognized to be "quasi-Cnidarians" or "stunted Bilaterians"
10. The Protistan Link in Transition: Down the Evolutionary Trail from Unicellular-Protozoa to Multicellular-Metazoa
11. Evolutionary Mysticism of Euglena: A Sagacious Soul of a Plant in the Body of an Animal
12. Virus: A Stepping Stone in Transition in the course of Evolutionary Journey from the World of "Non-Living" to the World of "Living" Entity
13. Once there was an ancestor between humans and apes: In the Quest for the enigmatic Missing-link
14. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam on Planet Earth: Humanity’s metaphoric Missing-link between Prehistoric Past and Contemporary Present

Conclusion: Missing-link: In Search of Our Distant Cousins Footprints, a Quest for Our Evolutionary Journey to the Past

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Biography

Dr Subir R. Kundu is a senior researcher conducting extensive studies on “in situ” conservation models at the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, India. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Gardens under the Botanical Survey of India in Howrah, India. Dr Kundu received his MSc. in botany from Kanpur University, Kanpur India, specializing in cytogenetics and plant breeding; he then received his PhD in botany from the University of Calcutta, specializing in plant geography, systematic botany, and conservation biology. He is the author of four botany and conservation-related books and numerous journal publications on conservation and evolutionary biology.