万物简史 第495期:多灾多难的生命进程(15)

Two points need to be kept in mind. 我们需要记住两点。 First, these are all just informed guesses. 第一、这些都仅仅是根据资料作出的推测。 Estimates for the number of animal species alive at the end of the Permian range fro

万物简史 第497期:多灾多难的生命进程(17)

What all this leaves us with, as one researcher has put it, is tons of conjecture and very little evidence. 这一切留给我们的，正如一位研究人员所说，是大量的猜测和很少的证据。 Cooling seems to be associated with at lea

万物简史 第498期:多灾多难的生命进程(18)

The KT meteor had the additional advantage advantage if you are a mammal, that is that it landed in a shallow sea just ten meters deep, KT陨石还有一个优势那就是说，要是你是个哺乳动物的话，那是个优势它在只有10米深的浅

万物简史 第496期:多灾多难的生命进程(16)

Even after stripping out the more crackpot notions there are still more theories for what caused the extinction events than there have been events. 即使去掉了不大切合实际的观点以后，解释灭绝事件原因的理论依然多子事件本

万物简史 第462期:生命在前进(4)

As with all extinct creatures, there is a natural temptation to regard them as failures, but in fact they were among the most successful animals ever to live. Their reign ran for 300 million yearstwice the span of dinosaurs, which were themselves one

万物简史 第455期:小生物的世界(26)

Between the autumn of 1918 and spring of the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. 1918年秋天到次年春天，美国有54842人死于流感。 The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers dead in France and Germany. 英

万物简史 第456期:小生物的世界(27)

Much about the 1918 flu is understood poorly or not at all. 对于1918年的那场流感，人们了解甚少，或者根本不了解。 One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges, and other earth

万物简史 第457期:小生物的世界(28)

From time to time certain strains of virus return. 有几种病毒不时重复出现。 A disagreeable Russian virus known as H1N1 caused severe outbreaks over wide areas in 1933, then again in the 1950s, and yet again in the 1970s. 一种名叫H1N1的

万物简史 第458期:小生物的世界(29)

In 1969, a doctor at a Yale University lab in New Haven, Connecticut, who was studying Lassa fever came down with it. 1969年，设在康涅狄格州纽黑文的耶鲁大学实验室里的一名医生在研究拉沙热的过程中倒下了，然而他活

万物简史 第459期:生命在前进(1)

21 Life Goes On 第二十一章 生命在前进 It isn't easy to become a fossil. 要变成化石可不容易。 The fate of nearly all living organismsover 99.9 percent of themis to compost down to nothingness. 几乎所有的生物其中的99.9%以上

万物简史 第461期:生命在前进(3)

I mention all this to explain why on a gray day in February I went to the Natural History Museum in London to meet a cheerful, vaguely rumpled, very likeable paleontologist named Richard Fortey. 我提这一切，是为了解释为什么我在阴沉沉

万物简史 第463期:生命在前进(5)

Even now, as Fortey says, it can be startling to go to the right formation of rocks 福泰说，即使现在，要是你来到合适的岩石结构， and to work your way upward through the eons finding no visible life at all, 一个又一个漫长的

万物简史 第464期:生命在前进(6)

As a boy Walcott discovered that he had a knack for finding fossils, particularly trilobites, 沃尔科特还是个孩子的时候就发现自己具有寻找化石的本领，尤其是三叶虫。 and built up a collection of sufficient distinction t

万物简史 第465期:生命在前进(7)

Dismounting to assist her, Walcott discovered that the horse had turned a slab of shale that contained fossil crustaceans of an especially ancient and unusual type. 沃尔科特跳下马来扶她，却发现马将一块页岩圈了个身。页岩里有

万物简史 第466期:生命在前进(8)

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, 要是你能以每秒钟一年的速度飞回到过去， it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the

万物简史 第467期:生命在前进(9)

The Burgess Shale included a range of disparity in anatomical designs never again equaled, 布尔吉斯页岩化石所包含的横剖面的花色范围是独一无一的， and not matched today by all the creatures in the world's oceans, Gould wrote

万物简史 第468期:生命在前进(10)

With his supervisor, Harry Whittington, and fellow graduate student Derek Briggs, Conway Morris spent the next several years making a systematic revision of the entire collection, and cranking out one exciting monograph after another as discovery pil

万物简史 第469期:生命在前进(11)

What was most surprising, however, was that there were so many body designs that had failed to make the cut, so to speak, and left no descendants. 然而，最令人吃惊的是，如此之多的体形，打个比方说，却缺少深度、没有留下

万物简史 第460期:生命在前进(2)

Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. 据认为，在10亿根骨头当中，只有大约l根能变成化石。 If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive todaythat's 270 mill

万物简史 第493期:多灾多难的生命进程(13)

For complex organisms, the average lifespan of a species is only about four million yearsroughly about where we are now. 对于复杂动物来说，一个物种的平均寿命只有大约400万年大致相当于我们人类迄今存在的时间。 Ex