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Jeffrey McKinnon

Our Ancient Lakes

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Date:
Monday, January 22
Time:
7:30 pm PST
Cost:
$5 – $25 Sliding Scale

Venue

The Wyncote NW Forum
1119 8th Ave (Entrance off Seneca St.)
Seattle, 98101 United States
+ Google Map

Community Events

22 and Under
Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
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Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History

Third Place Books
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Science

Discover the unexpected diversity, beauty, and strangeness of life in ancient lakes — some millions of years old — and the remarkable insights they yield about the causes of biodiversity.

Most lakes are less than 10,000 years old and short-lived, but there is a much smaller number of ancient lakes, tectonic in origin and often millions of years old, that are scattered across every continent but Antarctica: Baikal, Tanganyika, Victoria, Titicaca, and Biwa, to name a few. Often these lakes are filled with a diversity of fish, crustaceans, snails, and other creatures found nowhere else in the world. In Our Ancient Lakes, biology professor Jeffrey McKinnon introduces the remarkable living diversity of these aquatic bodies to the general reader and explains the surprising, often controversial, findings that the study of their faunas yield about the formation and persistence of species.

Shining a light on a class of biodiversity hot spot equivalent to coral reefs in the ocean or tropical rainforests on land, Our Ancient Lakes chronicles the often singular wonders of these venerable water bodies.

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Jeffrey McKinnon grew up reading Gerald Durrell and Farley Mowat, absorbing Jacques Cousteau and Marlin Perkins’ teachings from the TV, and watching animals in the ditches, farmyards, forests, and tidepools of Western Canada. He received his BSc from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. A Professor of Biology at East Carolina University, his research has taken him to every continent but Antarctica and has appeared in journals including Nature and the American Naturalist.


Presented by Town Hall Seattle.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle’s Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their author event series, staff picks, and exclusive editions at thirdplacebooks.com.

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