Iordansky Nikolai Nikolaevich (born 1938) is a Russian biologist and evolutionist. Readers are invited to the work “The Development of Life on Earth,” published in 1981. The author explains in detail general issues related to the scale of geological time, patterns of burial of the remains of organisms and their transformation into fossils, as well as the main methods for studying fossil organisms, and examines the main stages of the development of life on Earth. The final sections of the book are devoted to the origins of man and the general laws of the evolutionary process. The book is accessible to a wide range of readers, and can also serve as a manual for secondary school teachers and students of those institutes and faculties where the evolution of organisms is studied as part of general courses.