Step back in time to discover how crocodiles were once warm-blooded and how snakes had legs and burrowed underground. Meet terrifying giant birds, and tiny elephants living on islands. From the moment life crawled out of the oceans and onto land, to when our primate ancestors climbed down from the trees, the history of Planet Earth is filled with incredible stories. This beautifully illustrated non-fiction book explores some of the most exciting and incredible events in evolution, through 13 case studies. Among those included are: how whales once walked on four legs before taking to the oceans; how dinosaurs evolved into birds; and how the first cats were small and lived in trees. When the Whales Walked includes a mixture of annotated illustrations, illustrated scenes, and family trees.
Dougal Dixon studied geology and paleogeography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He is an award-winning author specializing in the earth sciences and evolution with many children's books and encyclopaedias to his name. He has acquired a reputation for putting over the concepts in a totally novel way. Along these lines his most notable books are After Man: A Zoology of the Future in which he explained the workings of evolution by postulating the types of animals that may evolve in times to come, and The New Dinosaurs, in which he described the zoogeography of the world by describing what life might be like today had the dinosaurs not become extinct.