Similarly, the immune systems of ancient animals like sharks may be much more sophisticated than we realize, which might explain their purported resistance to cancer. On the surface it may appear that horseshoe crabs haven’t changed much over the past couple hundred million years, but scientists are only now discovering that they may have changed significantly in less obvious ways. Both species have changed considerably since they split from their common ancestor more than half a billion years ago. But from an unbiased perspective, it’s obvious that modern day horseshoe crabs have spent just as much time evolving as modern humans. Humans, as relatively recent arrivals to Earth’s evolutionary saga, tend to place a premium on their “highly evolved” status.

For each goal species, he includes many entertaining details about the hunt, the animal’s natural history and how its story fits into the larger evolutionary picture.įrequently throughout the book’s 400 pages, Fortey discusses what it means to be “primitive”.

Gallantly, the author thanks his wife who arranged the numerous field trips that allowed him to seek out these disparate and hard to find creatures, some of which I’d never even heard of before. He also hunts down plants and animals some of whom are the last remaining representatives of their otherwise extinct groups – peanut worms, brachiopods, velvet worms, penis worms and gingko trees, to name a few. He seeks out horseshoe crabs, the most primitive living arthropod tuataras, the most primitive living reptile tinamous, the most primitive living bird and many more. Leaving his favorite trilobites at home, Fortey visits numerous disparate locales – New Zealand, Yellowstone, Ecuador, Delaware, Australia, Hong Kong, Newfoundland and more – to find species whose positions on the vast evolutionary tree of life are closest to the trunk. The result is Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms, a formidable catalog of some of the most bizarre and stubbornly persistent beings on the planet. Setting aside his usual rocks and fossils, he searches the world for “living fossils” – the most primitive creatures he can find – traveling many thousands of miles and venturing hundreds of millions of years into the Earth’s ancient biological past. Acclaimed author and paleontologist Richard Fortey has chosen a new way to travel back in time for his most recent book.

Horseshoe crabs and velvet worms