The Map that Changed the World [antikvár]

iCCustrations Chapter-Opening Illustrations Incorporated in eighteen of the nineteen chapter openings (including those of the prologue and the epilogue) will be found small line drawings of Jurassic ammonites—long-extinct marine animals that were so named because their coiled and chambered shells resembled nothing so much as the horns of the ancient Egyptian ram-god, Ammon. Soun Vannithone's drawings of these eighteen specimens are placed in the book in what I believe to be the ammonites' exact chronological sequence. This means that the book's first fossil, Psilocems planorbis., which illustrates the prologue, is the oldest ammonite, and is to be found deepest down in any sequence of Jurassic sediments; by the same token the final fossil, Pavlovia pallasioides, comes from a much higher horizon, and is very much younger. Much like the epilogue it illustrates, it was fashioned last. It must be said, though, that anyone who flips rapidly from chapter to chapter in the hope of seeing a speeded-up version of the evolutionary advancement of the ammonite will be disappointed: Ammonites—floating, pulsating, slow-swimming beasts that were hugely abundant in the warm blue Jurassic seas—do not display any conveniendy obvious changes in their features—they neither become progressively smaller with time, nor do they become larger; their shells