This book caught my eye several times on the library shelf (spanning months), finally I caved and brought it home. Delightful. It showcases a wide array of strange, unusual and rare animals- from quirky and frightening (deep sea creatures!) to just plain silly-looking (as noted by the author, ha). The text has snippets of information- where the animals live, how much or little (sometimes almost nothing) is known about them, what adaptations their odd appearances evolved for. Sometimes also unknown. Most stunning are the two-page illustrations of every specimen- meticulous in detail (and not just in the animals’ fur or shining eyes or textured skin, also the lichens and tree bark and whatever they’re posed on- so very lifelike)! I didn’t learn a whole lot about the animals that were new to me, except to realize now that hey, that creature exists in the world- but still I was wowed. Most fun is that the book features one animal that’s purely fictional. I guessed, and then handed the volume to my kid to look through and guess- we were both wrong! It wasn’t until later when I thumbed through the book a second time, enjoying the images all over again and typing into the computer every single one I didn’t know was real, that I figured it out. I knew of the tree kangaroo, the kakapo, tomato frog and morymid, the aye-aye and platypus and many birds-of-paradise, from reading or seeing pictures and documentaries about them before. But there were just as many I’d never heard of, much less seen pictures- and some of these are so rare, the internet doesn’t even have images, just a few bare descriptions or the same paintings from this book! I won’t tell you those names however, just in case you want to solve the puzzle for yourself.
Another curious thing is that this book has an interesting, variable format. Some of the pictures are very tall, and printed across the spread so the top of the image is the left of the lefhand page, bottom of the image is right of the righthand. Text flipped to read that way too, if you turn the whole book ninety degrees clockwise, you read it all down. Never saw that before!
Borrowed from the public library.
