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“... race was always on to find something new and preferably spectacular, and to get the credit for it. Richard Conniff’s entertaining book commemorates this contest, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries. The seekers sought out challenging, unexplored places likely to yield rich taxonomic rewards, notably Amazonia and the Dutch East Indies. Many of ...”

“... When the water started to rise, all the fish floated to the surface of the lake, bloated and dead, or convulsively dying. The people of the lakeside watched their livelihood disappear within a few days – there was no stopping the inundation. One of the tribal elders noticed the water had taken on a salty taste. Soon, it was lapping at the skimpy foundations of the wooden huts: there was nothing to do but flee before the onrush with what could be carried ...”

“... In 1586, William Camden reported in Britannia, his travel guide to British curiosities, that the bones of giants had been discovered in Essex. The evidence took the form of limb bones the size of small tree trunks, and enormous teeth. The local people were familiar with legends of their oversized forebears, and the bones provided visible testimony to the history behind the legends ...”

“... their own author. In aristocratic circles authorship was attributed to one of their own – Sir Richard Vyvyan was a popular candidate at fashionable metropolitan soirées when the sensation was at its height, and the name of Prince Albert was, according to one account, also suggested. In ecclesiastical circles any one of a number of free-thinking radicals ...”

“... from their frozen obscurity and brought back to life, once more to browse the Arctic plains? Richard Stone assumes that attempts to revive mammoths are a practical possibility. Frozen mammoth sperm, so the theory goes, may yet be viable. Techniques are already used routinely in fertility treatment that allow defrosted sperm to fertilise living eggs, so ...”

“... On his release from jail, Gordon Liddy, the Watergate conspirator, set up as a radio guru, with a nationally syndicated show dispensing cracker barrel philosophy and a folksy view of the world. A few years ago, I found myself a guest on the show as part of a tour to promote a book I had written on the long history of life on Earth. Liddy’s avuncular manner belied his previous history, and he was apparently no creationist; but, as I had anticipated, a caller from Kentucky duly declared that the world had been created in seven days, and what did I have to say to that? I invited the caller to ask himself whether, when his grandfather used the words ‘in my day’, he meant one particular day, or rather a season or a phase of life ...”

“... On 23 May 1909, Jacques Deprat left France for Hanoi with his young family to start a career as a geologist in the Service Géologique de l’Indochine. His advancement had been won against the odds. His beginnings were humble, if respectable, and he had progressed by virtue of hard work. He had published brilliant papers on the geological structure of Corsica, which had eventually earned him the respect of a distinguished sponsor, Professor Termier at the Ecole des Mines in Paris ...”

“... An excavation made in 1975, behind the town of Vedbaek in Denmark, revealed the body of a tiny child laid to rest in the embrace of a swan’s wing. Next to the skeleton was the grave of the child’s young mother, dead in childbirth, her remains decorated with snail-shell beads and pendants; her face had been dusted with red ochre, the better to seem alive ...”

“... of the Earth itself. But the sheer power of the processes at work may be a greater attraction. Richard Fisher’s signature appears on many of the illustrations. He must have visited these crucibles of steam and lava. It would have been good to know more about what it is like to be inside a living volcano, to hear the sounds of fumaroles popping, or feel ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... The birth of almost every science has been achieved with the help of a map. Astronomy began by mapping the stars. Anatomy – and modern medicine – is indebted to those flayed bodies laid out with such excruciating clarity in Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica. Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements gave inorganic chemistry its logic: the famous chart, which used to be posted on the wall of every chemistry laboratory like a sacred text, is as much map as matrix ...”

“... of the divine in the Conway Morris version. The word ‘numinous’ appears in a footnote; how Richard Dawkins would shudder. Do these differences in historical interpretation amount to anything more than the kinds of fiction which can be built around the idea that Hitler won the Second World War? What Gould called ‘re-running the tape of life’ is ...”

“... In 1952, Gustav Wängsjö published a 612-page monograph on early fossil vertebrates from the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. These fossils were the remains of sluggish, fish-like animals covered in bony plates, on which, more than 380 million years ago, the finest details of nerves and arteries had been as faithfully impressed as fingerprints in clay ...”

“... explain the Earth’s structure and movement, and turned continental drift into plate tectonics. Richard Fortey witnessed some of the ferment first-hand while studying for a PhD in palaeontology at Cambridge, and in the 1980s, he used the distribution of trilobite fossils from half a billion years ago to work out the positions of some of the land masses ...”

“... In The Crucible of Creation (1998) he attacked Gould, ‘biting the hand that once fed him’ as Richard Fortey put it in his review, in a way that made ‘a shoal of piranha seem decorous’.* The range of evolutionary options is tightly constrained, he insisted, and wherever there is life, on earth or any other planet, human-like creatures are likely ...”