The World Of Wild Animals By Alan De Queiroz Summary

This book begins with Alan de Queiroz explaining his map that he had on his wall, “As something of a map hoarder... I appreciate a map made with care…” (1). It 's a Mercator-style map, one that makes Greenland seem as large as Africa, and it 's titled The World of Wild Animals. He begins to explain how little children can connect the dots when it comes to the correlation between the continents and their inhabitants even though a five-year-old can confuse Africa and Australia. He hopes that children will soon understand that the reason why animals have certain characteristics is because of evolution. And that 's how he begins to explain one of his main points throughout this book, how animals evolved due to isolation from each other. ()
De Queiroz …show more content…
This is what you could call, Earth and life working in perfect harmony. I found this key point in his writing to be very interesting because I’ve never really thought about the idea of earth changing and then animals having to adapt or new species being created by such an event. In class we discussed the many different reasons for earth changes such as plate tectonics, sea floor spreading and the effects rivers and oceans have on land but we never really discussed what that meant for the life living on earth. I looked different scenarios of this happening in nature online because I got a little curious and a perfect example I found of this is would be the two different types of chimpanzees that evolved from a single ancestor because they were separated by the Congo River. Chimpanzees are not known for their swimming skills and many millions of years ago when the Congo River was formed the Bonobo lived more towards the south and were not able to cross the new geographical barrier so they got separated from the common ancestral chimpanzee and were forced to live and adapt to their now permanent home. The vicariance theory actually happens now a days too, such as birds or other animals having to find new homes do to the human population and their habitats being taken away from them, “we know that long-distance dispersal occurs …show more content…
Many of the people who tried to figure out these miracles got confused and were not always on the right track but through extensive research and the scientific method they were able to unfold some of earth greatest mysteries. I really appreciated this book because it showed how big of an effect geographers had on getting to better understand this world. My hopes is to one day become a geography or geology major and this book proves that we still have a lot to unfold and understand about this world. De Queioz’s left out many different ideas and thoughts about his personal beliefs in this book and I believe he did that because he just wanted to portray what he truly believe happened. I don’t think that’s a bad thing but I also don’t think that’s very good science either so I’m kind off torn between believing in what he has to say or just trying to figure out things on my