Ralph Buchsbaum (1907–2002)

Ever since I got interested in biology maybe twelve years ago, I've felt that I don't have a good grasp of the overall families of life. I'm still that way when it comes to plants and fungi, but this book was an attempt to get a good overview of invertebrates, and I was really very pleased with it.
It does a pretty good job of explaining the phyla, their known relationships, the anatomy and embryology of each phylum, and the different lifestyles of different members.

The book is not perfect. One problem is hardly the book's fault; I kept wanting to know more, in greater detail --- what are the detailed relationships between the phyla, how did they evolve, how is some embryology so different from other --- and right now no-one really knows the answers to these questions.

A second problem is that the book shows its heritage as a venerable (first edn 1937) textbook, with simple line drawings and black-and-white photos. The drawings and the photos are, I will be the first to admit, very good, but there were at least a few diagrams I could not fully understand (especially the discussion of snail anatomy and how everything fits into the shell), and I think color pictures would have given a rather more accurate view of the reality of these animals.

One issue I've never seen much commented on is the great disparity between sea life and land life, in that while plants are obviously very prominent on land, they are much less
so in the ocean. You have your bazillions of cyanobacteria, of course, and your kelp, but what one sees covering surfaces is sponges, coral, bryozoa and various other weird things that look like plants to naive eye.
It's not clear to me why there should be this strange disparity. Obviously plants can't grow below, what, maybe 100 feet or so that will block out the light, but that still leaves an awful lot of apparent space for them.
My suspicion is that this is an example of history, not inevitability, that animals got there first and, once established, out-compete any interloper from the plant (or fungal) world. But I really need to learn more about both plants and fungi before I can say anything useful on the subject.… (meer)