Re: book report

On 1/17/25 4:31 AM, John Harshman wrote:

On 1/14/25 5:13 PM, erik simpson wrote:

I've just finished reading "Macroevolutionaries" by Lieberman and Eldredge.  I recommend it highly.  It's a history extending from the beginning of the 19th century to the present of the evolution (no pun) of the gradual development of our understanding of evolution itself. One of the punctuations (pun intended this time) is the brilliance of SJ Gould.
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Some of the more funny chapters involves the evolution of trumpets, replete with a mass extinction of valveless trumpets around 1820, rapid diversification and eventual slower evolution to the present day. Clades can be identified. It seems that biology isn't the only thing that "only makes sense as evolution".

 How do slide trombones fit into the phylogeny? And are horns featured? Presumably they developed valves at around the same time.

Trombones were only morphologically different.  Horns were like trumpets, but differed in having three different types of valves so there were even more clades than trumpets.