When it comes to widely recognizable organizations that have become synonymous with the furtherance of science, few can compare to The Royal Society. Founded in 1660, it has since numbered such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Dorthy Hodgkin, and Alan Turing among its fellows.
Lying in my bunk at the Malheur Field Station after a long day of study for the Oregon Master Naturalist program, I suddenly heard the howl of a Coyote. Then another. Then two more. It is a sound like no other, and while I had often heard it before, it still sent a thrill down my spine; a thrill that would take dozens, perhaps even hundreds of pages to explain.
Through examining the types of locomotion employed by various living things and considering it agains that the environments in which each evolved, Wilkinson takes his readers through four billion years of movement and explains how the challenge of getting from place to place is really one of the driving forces behind evolution itself.
It was with no small amount of wholly unintentional irony that I began reading Mark Essig’s Lesser Beasts; A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig while eating a ham sandwich. Such is the ubiquity of pigs. Yet for all the many ways the lives of modern humans have and to this day continue to intersect […]