The Tree of Life

Where do we come from and how did we get here?

Come time-travelling through the history of every species that has ever lived with Professor Max Telford

A four-billion-year journey through the evolution of our planet, The Tree of Life tells the fascinating story of the gigantic family tree that records the relationships between every living thing - from humans, fish and butterflies to oak trees, mushrooms and even bacteria.

Understanding how the amazing diversity of life on earth came to be is one of the greatest puzzles in biology. And this book, full of vivid and fascinating stories, takes you right inside: learn why grey wolves are more closely related to whales than to Tasmanian wolves; how geological change and environmental catastrophe left their marks on the genome; why we don't have tails but we are the only species with chins; and follow individual scientists down winding evolutionary byways and occasional dead ends in their attempts to solve this greatest of all puzzles. Along the way, we'll see how, far from being a dry representation of the dead, the tree of life is a living thing which constantly alters our perspective on the past, present and future of life on earth.

From Darwin's early sketches to the vast computer generated diagrams scientists are building today, The Tree of Life explains how we can know our family tree at all and tells the epic history of the various ways it's possible to be a living thing. This is our own very personal story that began with the tiny ancestor of all life billions of years ago and ends with you and me.

About the Author

Max Telford is an evolutionary biologist and the Jodrell Chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London where he founded the Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution and the Telford Lab. Max has won several awards for his research (including a visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford) and has spent the last three decades researching the shape of the tree of life, his broader aim to discover the earliest events in the evolution of the animal kingdom. He lives in London. This is his first book.