From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time via the portal of magnificence.
Regard something attentively sufficient and it turns into an astonishment, shimmering with the miraculous.
Take lizards — a few of Earth’s commonest creatures, populating each continent besides Antarctica of their infinite varieties, and on the identical time a few of Earth’s most otherworldly life-forms. They transfer via the world of their contortionist our bodies, waterproof and heatproof of their keratin-scaled skinsuits, navigating not by smells in our acquainted sense however by pheromones streaming in via their vomeronasal sensory system. Some have tongues longer than their our bodies. Some have gloves of primordial velcro that helps them scale the steepest and most slippery of surfaces. Some change shade to mix with their atmosphere. Some can steer their eyes in numerous instructions. Some can run throughout water.
An epoch earlier than the chemical beginning of pictures, the German zoologist Alfred Edmund Brehm (February 2, 1829–November 11, 1884) got down to seize the science and marvel of lizards in one of many volumes in his voluminous collection Brehms Tierleben (Brehm’s Animal Life). Illustrating the detailed scientific writing are lots of of black-and-white etchings and a dozen consummate shade lithographs that seize these unusual and wondrous creatures in a method partway between diorama and fairy story.
Complement with some gorgeous natural-history illustrations of owls, marine mollusks, and beetles from the identical century, then leap one other century again with these putting drawings of actual and mythic serpents and the trailblazing artist Sarah Stone’s work of unique, endangered, and now-extinct species.
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