What?

Extraordinary animals is the tentative title for a book I have been working on since January of 2006 for Greenwood Publishing in the USA, the topic of which is the extraordinary diversity of animal life.

This book is essentially a cherry pick of the animal kingdom. It is not an inexhaustible list of all of the animals on earth. Such a book would take years to read and it would hardly be the sort of thing you could easily keep on your bookshelf.

All 120 animals in the book are real. Some are found outside your backdoor, others dwell in habitats where humans rarely venture. Some are miniscule, barely visible to naked eye and some are massive, thousands of times larger than a fully grown human. Many of them are rarely seen and there is still a great deal to learn about their lives as is the case for most animals on Earth.

Each piece within the book more or less stands alone and so you can pick it up wherever you please. There is a thread running through the book, but this is more of a concept. The animals are divided to exemplify the important parts of every animal’s life: reproduction, feeding and escaping danger. Of course, an animal does lots of things in its lifetime, but all can be roughly pigeonholed into one of these three categories.

Each piece contains information on how the animal is classified, what it looks like and how big it is and where it lives. The main body of the piece is devoted to the extraordinary ways or characteristics of the animal. A number of fact boxes give some extra, interesting information on the animal.

Hopefully, the finished book will be published sometime in 2007. Watch this space for more information.

Why?

In almost every conceivable habitat on earth animals can be found. In the deepest parts of the ocean, more alien to us than the surface of Mars, creatures thrive.

Even in the coldest and highest places on earth you would be hard pressed not to see some form of animal – perhaps only small ones, but they are still there.

To us, perhaps the most bizarre place to live is inside another animal, yet many creatures animals have taken to this parasitic way of life and have become very good at it.

There are lots of books out there on wildlife; however most of them focus on the larger beasts and the ones that are very well known. This is tip of the iceberg. Earth is crawling with animal life, much of which is, amazingly, unknown.

You can find a library worth of books describing these lesser known animals, but they are generally for a specialist audience and are pretty much inaccessible to the casual reader.

The aim of this book is to distill some of this information presenting it in a style that is accessible to almost everyone. It is hoped it will give a snapshot of the amazing diversity of animal life.

GO LOOK section

Some of the animals in the book can quite easily be found in a backyard or in places that are not that exotic and in these cases there is a GO LOOK section explaining how and where they can be found. This will be especially useful to those people who want to see the creatures for themselves.