Bird: exploring the winged world (Phaidon)

Grown-up book alert!
I'm very proud to have been one of the contributors for Phaidon's beautiful new Bird: Exploring the Winged World. As in Animal: Exploring the Zoological World (see below!), Bird is a visually stunning and broad-ranging tome celebrating humankind's fascination with birds.  I wrote about Carl Cotton's taxidermy, Charles Paine's graphic design, Xavi Bou's time-expanding photography and a whole heap of other incredible images. 

You can pre-order it from Phaidon's website here.

Why Can't Horses Burp? (Thames and Hudson)

The third and final book in Thames and Hudson's Curious questions about your favourite pet series, Why Can't Horses Burp is out of the stables. Hooray! Lily Snowden-Fine has done an amazing job (as usual) with the text and it's probably the widest ranging book of the trilogy, covering domestication, evolution, sport, fame... it's got it all! 

​Danny Dodo's Detective Diary (Thames and Hudson)
One of the Reading Agency's "must-read" titles for their Summer Reading Challenge 2021 

Danny Dodo's Detective Diary is out! Extinction is a huge subject, and massively important, and I hope Danny is a not-too-depressing guide though it. As well as encountering recently extinct animals (like Tasmanian tigers, pygmy elephants, moas, and river dolphins), Danny helps explain why animals are endangered today, and what we can do to help them.

What I'm most excited about in this book (apart from the fact that it features Rob Hodgson's illustrations) is that the extinct animals Danny encounters all became extinct since the last major ice age - during the Holocene: all the animals  in the book all struggled to survive in a world when humans proliferated around the world.  

I'm also pretty chuffed because Danny is the third in a suite of books Thames and Hudson have released on animals from the past (on dinos, and ice age beasts) that were written with Professor Mike Benton - who is one of the loveliest palaeontologists in the world!

You can track down a copy on Thames & Hudson's website, your favourite high street bookstore or at the super splendid bookshop.org.  

​Curious Questions About Your Favourite Pets (Thames and Hudson)

Thames and Hudson have published two books this year I have written on a pet theme for the Curious questions about your favourite pet series. These were really fun to write and I am very much pleased to now know which dogs like surfing and how sensitive cats' noses are. 

Both Why Do Dogs Sniff Bottoms and Why Do Cats Meow are illustrated by Lily Snowden-Fine and are available from Thames and Hudson's website (Dogs and Cats), Amazon, and the wonderful Bookshop. 

​Animal (Phaidon) 

I was so excited (and honuored) to be part of the writing team and  panel of experts who chose the 300 images that feature in Phaidon’s beautiful new tome Animal: Exploring the Zoological World.

I wrote about a fascinating range of images, from netsuke, to the earliest experiments in night photography, via the first European sketches of Darwin’s more enigmatic South American fossil mammal discoveries.

​I’m extremely proud to have been part of this, Phaidon’s visually stunning and broad-ranging survey that explores and celebrates humankind's ongoing fascination with animals.

The Amazing Animal Atlas (Flying Eye Books)

​The Amazing Animal Atlas was three-years in the making and was a collaboration between myself, Flying Eye Books and the downright crazy-talented Gaia Bordicchia. The Atlas is a beautiful, super-sized guide to some of the most spectacular animals found around Planet Earth, from the dolphins of the winding Ganges River in India to the desmans of Northern Europe’s thick forests. We really wanted to build something immersive and cinematic and Gaia’s illustrations totally achieved this. Sit down, open it out, and go for a spin around our extraordinary world. 

​Triassic Terrors (Flying Eye Books) 

The Triassic Period often doesn’t get too much of a look in compared to the Jurassic that followed it, but this was a fascinating period of Life on Earth when tiny dinosaurs fell prey to giant crocodile-like creatures called Pseudosuchians.

This was a time of diminutive dinos, when the land, seas and skies were inhabited by a host of strange prehistoric creatures. Many of the animals of the Triassic period were predecessors to the lumbering giants of the Jurassic but some were never seen again!

This was the first true age of the dinosaurs – and so much more. So get out your tools, dig in and discover Triassic Terrors!