locomotion

Book review – The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves

6-minute read

Can we predict what aliens will look like? On some level, no, which has given science fiction writers the liberty to let their imagination run wild. On another level, yes, writes zoologist Arik Kershenbaum. But we need to stop focusing on form and start focusing on function. There are universal laws of biology that help us understand why life is the way it is, and they are the subject of this book. If you are concerned that consideration of life’s most fundamental properties will make for a dense read, don’t panic, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy is a spine-tingling dive into astrobiology that I could not put down.

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Book review – Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils

6-minute read

Say “dinosaurs”, and most people imagine fossilised bones and spectacular museum displays. But body fossils are not the only remains we have with which to reconstruct dinosaur lives. Nor, and this might sound controversial, are they the most important. Or so argues palaeontologist, geologist, and ichnologist Anthony J. Martin. Ichnology is the study of animal traces, whether modern or fossilised. Most traces are ephemeral and disappear within hours or days, but occasionally some are buried and end up in the fossil record. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, and with more puns than you can shake a T. rex thigh bone at, Martin forays into the rich dinosaur trace fossil record: from footprints, burrows, and nests, to teeth marks and fossil faeces. For all the jokes, and despite having been published in 2014, he raises some really interesting points.

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Book review – New World Monkeys: The Evolutionary Odyssey

6-minute read

When I recently reviewed The Real Planet of the Apes, I casually wrote how that book dealt with the evolution of Old Work monkeys and apes, ignoring New World monkeys which went off on their own evolutionary experiment in South America. But that did leave me wondering. Those New World monkeys, what did they get up to then? Here, primatologist Alfred L. Rosenberger provides a comprehensive and incredibly accessible book that showed these monkeys to be far more fascinating than I imagined.

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Book review – Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind

6-minute read

When thinking of human ancestors, the name “Lucy” will likely come to mind. But a dedicated team of scientists spent decades labouring on the discovery of a species more than a million years older still, at 4.4 million years of age. Nicknamed “Ardi” and classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, it was finally revealed to the world in 2009. For a full decade, journalist Kermit Pattison immersed himself in the story of Ardi’s discovery to bring to life both the science and the scientists. The resulting Fossil Men is an incredibly well-researched book that tells the definitive insider’s story of how one of the most divisive fossils in palaeoanthropology was discovered by one of its most divisive characters: Tim White.

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Book review – The Real Planet of the Apes: A New Story of Human Origins

7-minute read

The history of human evolution has become firmly wedded to the Out of Africa hypothesis: the idea that we evolved in Africa and from there spread around the world. Back in 2015, palaeoanthropologist David R. Begun gave the proverbial tree of life a firm shake with The Real Planet of the Apes, making the case that the picture is a bit more complicated than that. Providing an incredibly well-written overview of the deep evolutionary history of great apes and humans, an interesting picture emerges of species moving into and out of Africa over time. Some reviewers hailed it as provocative—but is it really?

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Book review – Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness

7-minute read

In 2016, the scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote Other Minds where he explored the mind of the octopus—I reviewed it right before reading this book. Its bestseller status, including translations in more than 20 languages, was not entirely unpredictable. Octopuses are a sexy topic. Four years later, he explores animal minds further with Metazoa, with the tour now also including sponges, corals, shrimp, insects, fish, and mammals. Godfrey-Smith convinced me he is no one-trick pony when it comes to writing a good book, though this one is more cerebral than its predecessor.

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Book review – Convergent Evolution: Limited Forms Most Beautiful

6-minute read

Convergent evolution was the subject of the first book I reviewed on this blog and is a topic I keep returning to. MIT Press recently published two further books on it, Convergent Evolution on Earth in 2019 and Contingency and Convergence in 2020. I felt the time was ripe to finally read their 2011 book Convergent Evolution that I bought some years ago. All three of these are part of The Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, a series I hold in high regard. This, then, is the first of a three-part dive into what I consider one of evolutionary biology’s most exciting topics.

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Book review – Desert Navigator: The Journey of an Ant

7-minute read

When we think of animal navigation, the dramatic comes to mind: globe-trotting birds, migrating monarch butterflies, and ocean-crossing whales. But on a smaller scale, navigation is no less vital and no less interesting. Take the humble desert ant. Desert Navigator is the culmination of a lifetime worth of study by German zoologist Rüdiger Wehner and his many collaborators. It is an astonishing and lavishly produced book that distils half a century of experiments into a richly illustrated narrative.

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Book review – Fires of Life: Endothermy in Birds and Mammals

6-minute read

Endothermy, colloquially known as warm-bloodedness, was a major breakthrough in the history of life on Earth. It gave rise to the active lifestyle of birds and mammals. But how did it evolve? Research into this question has been ongoing for decades, though in the eyes of evolutionary physiologist Barry Gordon Lovegrove, the field has stagnated amidst competing single-cause hypotheses that all try to find that one killer explanation. In his wide-ranging Fires of Life, he brings together many disparate strands of research and gives an overview of our thinking on the evolution of endothermy in mammals and birds. Providing food for thought for students in this field, it also is a great overview for the general reader that stands out for its superbly accessible writing.

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Book review – How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movement and the Robots of the Future

Animals move in many different ways – hopping, gliding, flying, slithering, walking, swimming, etc. their way through our world. Studying how they do this brings together biologists, engineers, and physicists in disciplines such as biomechanics, bioengineering and robotics. Author David L. Hu, for example, is a professor of mechanical engineering and biology. How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls is a light and amusing romp through the many remarkable forms of animal locomotion, and the equally remarkable experiments that are informing the robots of the future, although it leaves out some notable examples.

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