The Dawn of the Deed

July 9, 2012
Combining thoughtful science with sheer fun, this book is impossible to put down. The central, fascinating question asked by Long, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (The Rise of Fishies), is, when did sexual reproduction first occur? Long, who played a role in discovering the oldest example of an embryo in the fossil record (380 million years old), is well positioned to answer the question. He looks at evidence from the fossil record, examines mating patterns and sexual preferences of living animals, and discusses the attributes of various sexual organs (including the size and speed of ejaculations for males of many species). The book is far from prurient, even though it’s intriguing to hypothesize how 70-ton dinosaurs might have copulated. Long provides great insight into the process of science and makes the compelling case that understanding the history of sexual congress offers incontrovertible documentation of the evolutionary process. The only downside is that he raises two important questions, then gives them short shrift: why sexual reproduction evolved at all and the evolutionary explanation for homosexuality. Nonetheless, this book deserves wide attention. Agent: Margaret Gee.

September 1, 2012
A handful of years ago, Long, a paleontologist, discovered a 380-million-year-old fossilized fish. That alone was pretty amazing, but here's the real attention-grabber: the fish was pregnant, with an embryo. The discovery completely changed the way researchers thought about the history of sex, pushing back the origins of internal fertilization to a much more ancient time. In this entertaining book, the author traces the evolution of sex, tackling the subject from a paleontological andto a lesser extentsociological perspective. The prose is lively and informative, without getting bogged down in tricky terminology or technical discussions only experts would be able to follow; and the book is full of surprising revelations (like the fact that ancient fish copulated male-on-female, rather than spawning in the water as modern fish do). It should be noted that readers looking for titillation would be well advised to look elsewhere: this is a serious study of an evolutionarily important subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)