"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) datingthe best known of these methodsand several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances, explaining how they reveal the age of our fossil ancestors such as...

""A splendid introduction to geology and paleontology for the lay reader. To compress Earth's history into a single, lucidly written volume is a major achievement."" --Publishers Weekly, starred review""Few people have both the knowledge and the writing ability to capture such a long and varied history in a compelling manner. In A Short History of Planet Earth, J.D. Macdougal demonstrates that he is one of the few."" --EarthThis exhilarating survey of the four and half billion years of Earth's history charts both the geological and biological history of the planet....