About the book: 2016 / Life on Earth could not be destroyed by the falls of huge asteroids, neither gigantic volcanic eruptions, but “floods” and changes in magnetic poles turned out to be insignificant events from the point of view of its existence. We can say that living beings have only united in the face of common adversity. For the last 3.5 billion years, it is they who have been working diligently on the Earth, throwing it either hot or cold - changing the planet’s climate from greenhouse to glacial and back, and at the same time changing themselves: with each climate change, more and more new creatures arise. Thus, the products of the last ice age were mammoths, cacti and, possibly, man, who is far from the first and not the last in an endless series of organisms transforming into each other. The book by Andrey Zhuravlev tells how paleontology helps to understand the present and future of our planet. Andrey Zhuravlev is a professor at the Department of Biological Evolution, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosova, scientific editor of the magazine “National Geographic Russia”».