The Modern Bestiary
A Curated Collection of Wondrous Creatures
From microscopic eyebrow mites to bu er ies that feast on crocodile tears, Joanna Bagniewska has produced a simultaneously riveting and somewhat hackneyed bestiary
Originally, bestiaries were wri en for moralising and/or religious purposes. For instance, medieval Christian bestiaries illustrated the wonders of God’s creation, as well as containing moral lessons. eir connection with biological reality was loose, and ctional animals – such as unicorns, gri ns, mermaids and phoenixes – appeared alongside real animals. Right up to the early 19th century, the design of living creatures was seen as evidence for a creator, as expounded by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural
eology: Or Evidence of the Existence and A ributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.
Ever since Charles Darwin, scientists have agreed that the “design” of living creatures results from natural selection and not from a creator. Paley drew the comparison between the design of a watch, with its intricate workings aimed to achieve accurate time keeping, and the design of living things, with equivalently intricate workings – all apparently designed for a purpose. Richard Dawkins titled his 1986 book e Blind Watchmaker to underscore the point that the appearance of intelligent design in nature is not evidence of a “watchmaker”: it is the product of the blind, cumulative, incremental process of natural selection with no ultimate purpose.
Joanna Bagniewska’s e Modern Bestiary consists of 100 two-page chapters, each one describing the remarkable and o en peculiar behaviour, anatomy or life history of a particular species. As the author acknowledges, selecting 100 out of the roughly 1.4m known species of animals inevitably means that many readers will search in vain for their favourite. e hundred species are grouped under “earth”, “water” and “air”, for terrestrial, aquatic and airborne species respectively. Most are vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and sh) or arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans). As the author emphasises in her introduction, all the facts reported in her bestiary, however odd, are – in contrast with medieval bestiaries – backed up by hard scienti c evidence.
How well does e Modern Bestiary ful l its aim of inspiring excitement and interest in the products of evolution? I think it is a bit of a curate’s egg. On the one hand, many of the biological facts are riveting and engaging: for instance, the biology of the microscopic mites that you
“The reader is often left with more questions than answers”
and I have living in our eyebrows, or the bu er ies that drink crocodile tears. On the other hand, the reader is o en le with more questions than answers: the book is very super cial in explaining why and how behaviours and structures evolved. I also found the corny, faux-tabloid style of writing annoying. “Ah, ants, the cool kids of the invertebrate world”, or “Knock knock! Who’s there? It is aye!” as an introduction to the chapter on the Madagascan lemur called the Aye Aye with its extraordinarily long middle nger used for extracting grubs from ro en wood.
You may enjoy thumbing through the book to glean interesting anecdotes for dinner party conversations, but don’t expect to gain much insight into how evolution by natural selection works.