Books Details
Author : Ivan R Schwab Pages : 306 pages Publisher : Oxford
University Press, USA Language : ISBN-10 : 0195369742 ISBN-13 :
9780195369748
Books Descriptions
With predation and carnivory as catalysts, the first known eye
appeared in a trilobite during the Cambrian explosion
approximately 543 million years ago. This period was a crucible
of evolution and teemed with anatomic creativity although the
journey to formed vision actually began billions of years
before that. The Cambrian period, however, spawned nearly all
morphologic forms of the eye, followed by descent over hundreds
of millions of years providing an unimaginable variety of eyes
with at least ten different designs. Some eyes display
spectacular creativity with mirror, scanning or telephoto
optics. Some of these ocular designs are merely curiosities,
while others offer the finest visual potential packed into a
small space, limited only by the laws of diffraction or
physiological optics. For example, some spiders developed tiny,
well-formed eyes with scanning optics and three visual
pigments; scallops have 40-100 eyes circling their mantle, each
of which has mirror optics and
