I’ve always had a love for weird and wonderful animals. As a kid, I used to collect lizards, snails, beetles, and caterpillars. When I was 15, I hid a family of white mice under the house so my parents wouldn’t find them. We bred guinea pigs and rats for a time. It was almost inevitable that I would end up writing about animals. As a science communicator, I tell stories about how strange yet relatable so many of the creatures living among us can be. I also love an adventure, and I hope these books capture your imagination as they did mine!
I wrote
Creatura: Strange Behaviours and Special Adaptations
This might just be my desert island book. I’m not ready to put a pin in that statement just yet, but I can’t think of another book that captured my heart quite like this one.
Written by Douglas Adams, of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and British zoologist Mark Carwardine, this 1990 masterpiece takes the reader on a round-the-world journey to encounter some of the most endangered and charismatic species on Earth. Destinations include Zaire, China, New Zealand, and Mauritius. Subjects include blind river dolphins, the Komodo dragon and the kakapo – a giant, flightless parrot that is the living embodiment of a muppet.
The beauty of this book about animals is just how utterly human it is. To see the deep connection Carwardine has with the species they seek and Adams’ wide-eyed curiosity as he tries to keep up through remote forest hikes and rocky boat rides is exhilarating.
I can also thoroughly recommend the 2009 television series of the same name, which stars British comedian, Stephen Fry, as he follows in Adams’ footsteps. Carwardine once again plays host, and his interaction with a rather frisky kakapo has become legendary.
'Descriptive writing of a high order... this is an extremely intelligent book' The Times
Join Douglas Adams, bestselling and beloved author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and zoologist Mark Carwardine on an adventure in search of the world's most endangered and exotic creatures.
In this book, Adams' self-proclaimed favourite of his own works, the pair encounter animals in imminent peril: the giant Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the lovable kakapo of New Zealand, the blind river dolphins of China, the white rhinos of Zaire, the rare birds of Mauritius island in the Indian Ocean and the alien-like aye-aye of…
Quite literally a bizarre animal adventure (the original Japanese title translates to “An Adventure Surrounding Sheep”), this charming novel was my first foray into the dream-like storytelling of Murakami. Sometimes sleepy and comforting, sometimes thrilling and sometimes downright brain-bending, this tale of a couple’s mission to track down a sheep of mythic proportions had me doing laps around my house, unable to put it down, but in desperate need to get up off the couch (who else spent the holidays in lockdown?).
Speaking of lockdown, and the lack of agency many of us feel right now as we enter the third year of a pandemic, this book offers tacit permission to go with the flow, to accept whatever life throws at you.
Why should fluffy, cute and beautiful animals get all the attention? What about the fleshy, bulbous, beady-eyed monstrosities whose bodies favour function over form?
If you’re a weird animal enthusiast like me, this illustrated compendium features the usual suspects, such as the naked mole-rat and southern elephant seal. But it’s also got some obscure surprises, including the (honestly quite attractive) maleo, and the monkey slug caterpillar, also known as the hag moth (both of which are suitable monikers for this shaggy mess of a thing).
It just goes to show that no matter how extensive your knowledge about animals is, there will always be a new species to discover and perhaps even fall in love with. If that happens to be the blobfish, well, each to their own, I guess.
CBCA EVE POWNALL AWARD HONOUR BOOK 2020WINNER THE BEST DESIGNED CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION ILLUSTRATED BOOK ABDA AWARD 2020SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABIA BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN 2020Marvel as you enter the fascinating hidden world of ugly animals in this encyclopaedia of the animal kingdom's most unusual and beauty-challenged species. It's time for ugly animals to shine!With more than sixty ugly animals to explore, this compendium of the unusual celebrates the beauty in 'ugliness'. Children and adults alike will pore over the breathtaking scientific illustrations of unusual animals, debating their…
From a wild sheep chase to a grand old treasure hunt that gripped a nation, the Quest for the Golden Hare tells the real-life story of one of the most famous book-related escapades in recent memory.
In 1979, British artist Kit Williams published Masquerade – a cryptic storybook containing clues to the whereabouts of an 18-carat gold hare trinket that Williams buried somewhere in the English countryside. Author Bamber Gascoigne was the only other person present at the burial, and was tasked with documenting the frankly bonkers lengths the crazed fans would go to uncover it.
I’m loath to mention the pandemic again, but in these times, when most of us are going stir crazy and are itching for an adventure, this book might just be the next best thing. (Bonus points if you can source a copy of Masquerade while you’re at it, which I believe has been out of print for quite some time.)
An obscure and fantastic book, Eléphasme, Rhinolophon, Caméluche et autres merveilles de la nature is a collection of illustrations of imagined beasts. From toads with feathery axolotl gills and seabirds with a probosci's monkey snout to a hairy chicken with hooves, these animals don’t make any sense, but they sure are beautiful to look at.
I stumbled on it back in 2012, during my first trip to Paris, visiting a singular shop called Deyrolle, which is filled with taxidermy, bones, bugs, and other curiosities. This book might be one of the most special things I own, and it’s almost impossible to find outside of France. For those who are determined to track it down, I can assure you, it’ll be worth it.
There’s no doubt that Australia has more than its fair share of weird and wonderful animals - just think about the platypus - but the true diversity of our wildlife is more extraordinary than you might imagine. There’s the caterpillar that wears its old head shells as a macabre hat, the cuscus that wraps itself in a blanket of leafy camouflage and the fish that targets prey with a high-powered jet of water. In this collection of stories from Australian Geographic blog Creatura, science writer Bec Crew celebrates the strange behaviours, special adaptations, and peculiar features of our amazing Australian creatures.
