In 2001, I bought the book The Variety of Life by Colin Tudge. It is a beautiful book that has a lot of small scientific illustrations of life forms that have existed at different times throughout the history of Earth based on fossil evidence. It introduced and taught me about phylogenetic systematics. This is a classification system of organisms based on the idea of evolutionary patterns and relationships. I think of the phylogenetic classification system as the next and better version that follows the Linnean binomial classification system. The author pointed out the limitations of the old system.
I learned about kingdoms, phylum, genus, species, and all those terms in high school. I did not understand them. I was not very interested in biology as it was taught in school as a collection of fragments of information. As an adult, I discovered that evolution is regarded as the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. Learning about it has provided me with a large framework into which the once-disconnected details can be seen as part of a larger structure of ideas.
The book helped me form an image of all lifeforms based on descent with modifications and common ancestors shared by lineages of organisms. The tree of life, with branches diverging into different species, produces a nested hierarchical organization. The book introduced the term clades.
Parts of the map of life are organized based on fossils, and others are built using information based on morphological traits and comparative genomic analysis of living species.
It is an important book to me as it led me to continue studying biology and to make more discoveries. Biology led me to the study of geology and the earth, to astronomy and the formation of star systems, and the current models of the history of the universe. All of it is scientific knowledge that is connected and part of a larger picture that attempts to provide an explanation for the things that exist and a process for how they may have come into being.
Link: The Variety of Life by Colin Tudge.