The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Chapter 15: Octopus The New York Review of Books has published an excerpt from this chapter . page 229: a bleached version of Marge...

Chapter 14: Nautilus page 213: nothing so odd will do long. More about Nipponites here . page 222: Motion pictures...have enhanced...

Audax jumping spider. See page 200 Chapter 13: Mystaceus, a jumping spider page 199 (marginal note): approximately 110 families...

  Chapter 12: Leatherback  page 186: throat...lined with sharp...spikes . See photo here .  Jellyfish are bread and butter . See p...

For all the grandeur of rainforests, savannahs and coral reefs, deep life is probably a more persistent feature of our planet.  -- Deep L...

Greater honeyguide Chapter 11: Kìrìpʰá-kò and Tʰìk’ìlí-ko, Honey badger and Honeyguide page 172 (marginal note): torture . The sear...

 ...Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence, I see South Mountain far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight going home. A...

Mandrill Chapter 10 Japanese macaque page 154: female assisted by a male to whom she grants privileges . In The Serpent's Promis...

In an article for The Chronicle for Higher Education I write: We need to spend a lot more time and psychic energy imagining not just...

Chapter 9: Iridogorgia  page 134: symmetry . Mathematical forms too. Jason Padgett, a number theorist and artist with Acquired Savant ...

In an interview with Sharon Blackie in Issue 4 of Earthlines , Robert Macfarlane says: Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagin...

Chapter 8: Human   page 118: human hands have fine motor skills. They are also essential, in coordination with arms and shoulders, in...

Chapter 7 Gonodactylus, the genital-fingered stomatopod page 100:  mantis shrimp . The Oatmeal explains why these are his new favorite ...

Chapter 6 Flatworm   page 87 various phyla of worms. ..among the phyla not mentioned in the book is Acanthocephala, the Thorny-headed ...

Brinicles, filmed forming in situ for the first time in 2011, were presented as fingers of death . But Julyan Cartwright and others observ...

Chapter 5: Eel page 70 salmon . Research published earlier this year showed that sockeye salmon remember magnetic values of geographic ...

The starling I knew personally was Max...I think of the years of he lived with us, of his excitements and irritations, his swearing (of th...

Chapter 4: Dolphin page 52: direct experience . In his forthcoming book, The Sea Inside , Philip Hoare describes an encounter with a s...

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can c...

Chapter 3: Crown of Thorns starfish page 40: starfish . Smithsonian has recently published a pleasant overview of some amazing features...