“Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction: The Late Paleozoic Ice Age World” at £40 is expensive for a paperback. Then so was ‘Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science’ by Tom Garrison when I bought a copy, International Student Edition in UK, many moons ago and well worth cost packed full of essentials. I can recommend this book too – essential reading for some of the deniers we see around here.

I’ll offer my rework of a geo-time spiral I found in another excellent book, cited in top right of the image, to which I added a tree diagram.

http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/Misc/RevGTSL2010.jpg

It is about eight years since I last updated that image so would substitute this url in place of one given:

http://www.stratigraphy.org/index.php/ics-chart-timescale

Since we’re on mass extinctions in deep time, I’ve just bought Peter Brennen’s The Ends of the World as a Christmas present for someone interested in all this. I haven’t read it through, only dipped in, but it looks good enough for a recommend – not least because there isn’t another popular science, up-to-date treatment of the causes of mass extinctions that I know of. The next nearest thing is probably Tony Hallam’s Catastrophes and Lesser Calamities, which is very good, but quite dense, not perhaps ideal for a first read into the subject.