This new edition offers many new and enhanced features, including more than a hundred new figures, 75 new questions at end of chapter "Questions for Review and Discussion," and additional "Enrichment Boxes." Furthermore, new sections have been added, including: A Variety of Paleozoic Living Strategies and What Lies Ahead for Humanity. The revised Geological Time Scale is also included to conform to the most recent recommendation of the International Congress on Stratigraphic Nomenclature.
Absolutely amazing book about earth's geological time, with incredible illustrations through out.
It's an older book, so there are some things that are not completely up to date. But it still provides a solid overview of the formation of earth and deep time!
If you're looking for a summary of geological and paleontological history of the world (though with a bit more of a focus on North America) this is an excellent way to learn it. Plenty of figures and fairly engaging to read. It is still a textbook, but it really does have the history of Earth through time.
My only complaints are that some of the calculations in the book were clearly done wrong for subjects outside of geology. The amount of helium produced by the sun, the volume of the protonebula for the solar system, and some cases where it would need to be "billion billion" rather than "billion" to be accurate. Perhaps these are pedantic points, in that the point of the textbook was to emphasize the largeness of some values, but with a physics/mathematics background I cannot just let them stand.