Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary engineering:
the egg. It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth. 'Jules Howard's egg's-eye
view of evolution is dripping with fascinating insights' ALICE ROBERTS 'So much passion and
poetic prose' BBC Radio 4 Inside Science If you think of an egg what do you see in your
mind's eye? A chicken egg hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg
cell prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blue eggs of the
blackbird? Every egg there has ever been is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of
the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to
be. Quite simply without this universal biological phenomenon animals as we know them
including us could not have evolved and flourished. In Infinite Life zoology
correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning
coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests where insects were stirring
to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power.
Eggs would evolve from out of the sea be set by animals into soils sands canyons and
mudflats be dropped in nests wrapped in silk hung in stick nests in trees covered in
crystallised shells or secured by placentas. Whether belonging to birds insects mammals
or millipedes animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology forged by mass
extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally the epic story of their
role in the tapestry of life can be told. 'In a book that brilliantly evokes past eras
Howard provides a new perspective on the history of life on Earth.' The Mail on Sunday
