MrDarwin

I haven't read it yet, but Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods by Jennifer Clack just got a very good review in one of the biological journals.

pz

I've read it. It is very good, but if you've read Zimmer's At the Water's Edge and expect something as readable, you're going to be disappointed. It's pretty dense in places. If you can't remember the difference between an ectopterygoid bone and an epipterygoid, be prepared to spend some time whacking your frontal and parietal bones against some vertically-oriented masonry. It's been some years since I studied comparative anatomy, so I had to struggle quite a bit through big chunks of the book. Here's a representative paragraph:
That's the style of the whole book: rather dry, with lots of anatomical and taxonomical detail. Casual readers who just want the big picture are better off reading Zimmer's book; anyone who gets excited about the first half of that book and wants much more depth can then move on to Clack's.

Coragyps

What pz said! It reads like a textbook, not a "popular treatment" at all. I learned a lot reading it, yes, but it's not a book to knock off over the weekend.
One of the things I liked best about it is how well it shows just how hard those paleo people must have to work - scratching out little crappy bits of rock that were once bone, and then carefully putting them together and comparing the result with the other fossils that others put together - and then double-checking all that work to try to ferret out what is related to what. Cool stuff, but it'd kill me to even try. I'm too impatient.

Blinn

I'm reading it now, bit by bit. There is a tremendous amount of info there, but thankfully there is a figure on almost every page to help the reader digest it (pictures good ).

Albion

This level of detail does rather give the lie to the creationist attitude that palaeontologists pull a bone fragment out of the ground, give it a quick glance, and pronounce it a - horror - transitional fossil! if they had the faintest clue of what palaeontolofy researchers really do, I wonder if it'd make a difference to them.

Camaban

As long as they can still convince others that that's what they do, probably not.

MrDarwin

Apparently, most creation "scientists" have the same attitude, since they rarely do research of their own, and instead tend to recycle, redigest, reanalyze, and regurgitate the hard work and research that other scientists have done. No surprise that so much of it looks like vomit.