Origin and Evolution of Tropical Rain Forests

Superb summary of a world of data:
I love the one previous review--I wish my kids would review my books! But perhaps we need more detail here.... This is a truly superb integration of a mass of data, much of it unpublished palynological material from oil company files and other sources. On the basis of these data, Morley manages to overturn every standard cliche about rain forest history. The rainforests are not as old as often claimed; they took final form in the early Tertiary, or at the oldest in the very late Cretaceous. The Southeast Asian/Malesian forest is not the origin point for rainforests or for angiosperms; its richness in ancient forms is due to its serving as refugium during many climatic and geotectonic vicissitudes. Plate tectonics is critical to understanding the history of the forests. (I recall how plant geographers, in my student days, tied themselves in knots trying to explain rain forest plant distributions without invoking the hated and feared theory of continental drift.) The whole story, as told by Morley, is amazingly gripping--a sort of mega-detective-story. If you are literate in tropical plant taxonomy, you will be on the edge of your chair, whether you are a botanist, a cultural ecologist (like me), or just a plant lover. Be warned, though--if you haven't been there (to at least a couple of tropical rain forest areas) and gotten to know the major families, this book will be hard going. The book closes with the inevitable and all too appropriate gloom. My grandchildren will probably never see a tropical rain forest. By the time they will be old enough to travel, there will be no tropical rain forests left, except perhaps in inaccessible reserves--unless we can turn around a process that seems out of control. Morley blames "short-term human greed" on his ultimate page (286), but the truth is more complex; see William Ascher's book, WHY GOVERNMENTS WASTE NATURAL RESOURCES, for the whole story. Anyway--this is one book that should be on the "must read" list of everyone interested in tropical forests or in paleobotany.

Geological Evolution of Tropical Rainforests:
A truly triffic piece of academia, Dad!