Resisting evolution

There lived a happy Coelacanth
In dim, primordial seas;
He ate and mated, hunted, slept,
Completely at his ease.
Dame Nature urged: ‘Evolve!’
He said: ‘Excuse me, Ma’am,
You get on with making Darwin,
I’m staying as I am.’

Horace Shipp’s little hymn to the ‘living fossil’ fish-with-legs — thought long extinct then astonishingly discovered in a South African fish market in the 1930s — gets the evolutionary process upside down, of course. Evolution is not something that a fish, or a dame, wills; it just happens. Nonetheless, the poem captures the curiosity of the fact that, while some lineages change dramatically over time, others do not.

Set the sat-nav on your time machine to the Carboniferous, 300 million years ago, and you would land in an alien world. No grass, no flowers, no birds or mammals, no frogs or snakes, no ants or flies. Yet among the unrecognisable life forms, a few creatures would instantly be familiar from living examples on today’s earth: horseshoe crabs, velvet worms, scorpions, lampreys, lungfish, ammonites, cycad trees, horsetail ferns.

It is these ‘survivors’ that Richard Fortey has set out to visit in their haunts, a task that takes him — poor chap — all over the world to wander among beaches, forests, deserts and swamps. One moment he is marvelling at prelapsarian ‘stromatolites’ in Shark Bay, western Australia — pillow-shaped structures in shallow salty water built by thin films of microbes and a type of life that existed two billion years ago; the next he is at a Buddhist shrine in China, visiting the only wild specimens of the gingko tree, whose leaves, unchanged, are found as fossils from early in the time of the dinosaurs, 200 million years ago.

If you have not the time to follow in his footsteps, then take the armchair tour with Fortey as your genial and fascinating guide.