Remarkable Creatures

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  • Author: Sean Carroll
  • Publisher: Quercus
  • Catalogue: 174375
  • Size: 24x16cm
Remarkable Creatures is the story of the making of the theory of evolution. On the Origin of Species was published on the 24th of November 1859, but world-changing theories aren’t made in a day: our tale begins a decade before Charles Darwin’s birth, and spans more than two hundred years. It leads us through the rain forests of South America, navigates polar oceans and central Asian deserts before diving into the very stuff of life itself, the tightly coiled double helix of DNA. It tells the three-billion-year story of life, unearthing ape-men, rhino-sized giant sloths, and the most alien life forms that squirmed across Earth’s sea floors 500 million years ago. But these aren’t the most remarkable creatures in this story: that distinction belongs to the men and women whose drive to discover led them to uncharted shores and to a new understanding of ourselves, of life and our planet.

Remarkable creatures circumnavigates the globe with Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace and Bates. Prodigious collectors of bugs, birds, and anything else that moved, these men spent years - decades even - way from home, endured shipwreck, disease and deprivation in the pursuit of knowledge. With first-hand accounts, Sean Caroll recreates the epic voyages that gathered the data that forged the theory of evolution.

Captivating and lucid, Remarkable Creatures tells the exhilarating story of the scientists who walked where no others had walked, saw what no one else had seen, and thought what no one else had thought. It is a celebration of the infinite miracle of life and the quest to understand it.