Text and digitally-created illustrations cover more than one hundred of the earliest beasts with profiles on their physical characteristics, habitat, behavior, and distribution across prehistoric Earth.

Includes index.

The rise of life. Cambrian period (543 to 490 mya [i.e., million years ago]) ; Ordovician period (490 to 443 mya) ; Silurian period (443 to 417 mya) ; Devonian period (417 to 354 mya) ; Carboniferous period (354 to 290 mya) ; Permian period (290 to 248 mya) -- The age of reptiles. Triassic period (248 to 206 mya) ; Jurassic period (206 to 144 mya) ; Cretaceous period (144 to 65 mya) -- The age of beasts. Palaeocene epoch (65 to 55 mya) ; Eocene epoch (55 to 34 mya) ; Oligocene epoch (34 to 24 mya) ; Miocene epoch (24 to 5 mya) ; Pliocene epoch (5 to 1.8 mya) ; Pleistocene epoch (1.8 mya to 10,000 years ago).