About the book: year / This book is about paleontology - the only science that can show who the ancestors of the various creatures inhabiting today's Earth were . Until quite recently, we did not even suspect that whales descend from artiodactyls, birds from dinosaurs, and beetles and spiders - of course, through many intermediate stages - from worms with a proboscis and claws on soft legs. Yes, molecular biology can explain who is related to whom, and prove that birds are closer to crocodiles than to turtles, and whales are closer to hippos than bears. But what did these bird-crocodiles or whale-hippos look like? All living things were constantly changing, all organisms were in fact transitional forms and, it turns out, looked completely different than one might assume when studying the modern natural world. It is impossible to cover all these forms in one book, but we will try to talk about the most interesting.