Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
New. No dust jacket. 270 p. Angiosperms constitute a major part of present-day plant diversity. Their apparently sudden invasion in Mesozoic plant communities puts a perpetual challenge to the theory of organic evolution. This book offers some explanations based primarily on the concept of parallel evolution in various proangiospermous plants making a collective advance to angiospermy. The angiosperm origins are seen as a process starting with early seed plants of mid-Devonian age and progressing through a number of morphological grades linked by transitional forms. The proangiosperms form a grade immediately preceding the advent of flowering plants. Fossil proangiosperms and angiosperms tend to occur in clusters as if they were growing side by side in some special types of angiosperm cradle communities. A rapid directional evolution in such communities might have conceivably been guided by a replacement of their climax dominants by successional species and by an ecological expansion of the latter after major environmental impacts. The book contains a description of the morphological grades and their linking forms, a discussion of seed plant evolution, an overview of early angiosperms and their environments, and an analysis of morphological trends in separate organs and their implications for angiosperm phylogeny. Richly documented by ca. 600 original photographs of various plant fossils, with a very rich bibliography as well (about 500 citations). Destined mainly for botanists and palaeontologists but, as an example of a highly original, anti-Darwinian and anti-cladist, way of thinking, also for all those who are interested in evolutionary theory and phylogenetics.
