This title introduces students to the groups of vertebrates and explores the anatomical evolution of vertebrates within the context of the functional interrelationship of organs and the changing environments to which vertebrates have adapted.[...]

The landscape of southwestern Wyoming around the ghost town of Fossil is beautiful but harsh; a dry, high mountain desert with cool nights and long, cold winters inhabited by a sparse mountain desert community. But during the early Eocene, more than fifty million years ago, it was a subtropical lake[...]