Astonishing Animals : Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit

Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous artwork of bizarre and exotic animals
Review: _Astonishing Animals_ by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten is an absolutely gorgeous coffee-table sized book, a work of splendid artwork and informative and occasionally humorous text. Producers of the similarly excellent _A Gap in Nature_, the authors this time concentrate not on animals that became extinct in historical times but living, odd, extraordinary animals, many of them quite unfamiliar to me and I daresay many armchair naturalists.

The first section is titled "The Vertical Terrain" and focuses on animals in mountainous terrains, specifically tropical mountains, which can have habitats varying from snow and alpine meadow at the summit to lowland jungle at its base. We meet in this section the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia of New Guinea, a bird of paradise with the longest tail feathers relative to body size of any bird (they are over three times longer than the bird's body). Similarly unusual is the King of Saxony Bird of Paradise, also of New Guinea; in this species the brow plumes of the male bird are over twice the length of the bird's body, looking somewhat like very oddly shaped huge antennae.

The second section is titled "Motion Specialists," and focuses on species that move in innovative and unexpected ways. The Mysore Slender Loris of India is a lemur-like primate of the thorny acacia forest, notably in that it moves in a slow, deliberate manner, always keeping grasp of the branches with at least three of its limbs, always from above, never from below.

The third section is called "Food & Feeding" and details animals with unusual diets and feeding techniques. We meet the Dingiso, a ground-dwelling tree-kangaroo (as contradictory as that might sound) discovered by Flannery himself in 1994 in the wilds of New Guinea. Delacour's Langur from the forests of central Vietnam is a beautiful but poorly studied primate, boasting a "pot belly" which contains a large stomach that is capable of fermenting the leaves upon which it feeds. The Curlew-jawed Mormyrid of South America is a freshwater fish with a long proboscis and the ability to generate its own electric field; both are used by the fish to find its aquatic prey, information from both is sent to its brain, the largest relative to body weight of any fish. Pesquet's Parrot of New Guinea looks more like a vulture than a parrot, with a bald-head and a long bill, though it does not feed on dead animals but the droppings of cassowaries (specifically the undigested fruits seeds within the feces).

The fourth section is "Shape-shifters," focusing on animals of unusual shapes and sizes. The Oriental Bay Owl of southern Asia looks like, when at rest, a broken, lichen-covered branch, all but impossible to see. The garish-colored Tomato Frog of Madagascar looks like a ripe tomato, an example of convergent evolution with the poison arrow frogs of the Americas. The authors produce life-sized pictures of the bumble bee-sized Kitti's Hognosed Bat of Thailand and the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba (which weighs only two grams).

Section five is called "Habitat Specialists" and deals with extreme specialists. The Marsupial Mole, Naked Mole Rat, Pink Fairy Armadillo, and the Star-nosed Mole are all striking examples of convergent evolution from different continents. The Sail-Tailed Lizard of eastern Indonesia is a sail-backed river-dwelling lizard, a poorly studied animal that may be a freshwater analogue of the Galapagos Island Marine Iguana. The Asian Giant Softshell Turtle, as its name might suggest, is not protected by a hardshell at all, something that was dispensed with for mysterious reasons. It is able to live in the polluted Ganges River and the canals of Canton and Jakarta, feeding on just about anything. The Yellow-Headed Picathartes of West Africa is a bald-headed bird that feeds exclusively on insects that breed in bat guano.

The final section is titled "The Vertical Ocean" and has some of the most unusual animals and evocative illustrations in the book. The stars of this part are marine animals from both the surface waters and the deepest abyss. The male Strap-toothed Whale and the Dense-Beaked Whale produce huge overgrown, curving tusks that when fully developed permit their jaws to only open a few centimeters (it is not known how the up to 7 meter long animals continue to feed). The Crested Basketfish has highly developed pectoral and pelvic fins that produce a virtual net in front of its head, a device that is believed to either sieve the water or to enwrap prey. The nightmarish Stoplight Loosejaw looks like as if it has had its throat coat; its jaws, stripped down to skin, bone, and tendons are constructed to allow for extremely rapid action. The Jellyfaced Spookfish of the very deep Indian Ocean (found two and a half kilometers below the surface) appears to have a head made of jelly, so transparent one can see the veins and arteries carrying blood to its brain and mouth.

The authors caution that one of the 97 animals in the book is imaginary; completely made up just for the book. Several times when reading about an animal I had to stop and wonder if that was the animal that existed on in the imagination. Was it the 34 millimeter long Pygmy Chameleon? The Bougainville Monkey-Faced Bat (found in the remote Solomon Islands, having evolved large, hard, pointed teeth and chewing muscles so powerful that their skulls have developed bony crests, enabling the animal to tackle even young coconuts)? Or maybe the Falanouc of Madagascar, once classified as an insectivore but now recognized as an unusual carnivore, a vaguely fox-like animal that lives in small family groups or solitarily on the forest floor, feeding on frogs and insects? A beautiful and informative book, I highly recommend it as this work does not focus on what some have titled charismatic megafauna (i.e. over-exposed and well- known animals like lions or giant pandas) but often quite obscure animals, all of which are beautifully illustrated.