Osedax worms

Book review – Life Sculpted: Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi That Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth

8-minute read
keywords: paleontology

Though we marvel at the creative side of evolution, the destructive flip side of that coin often gets less attention. Since its first stirrings, life has been involved in a war of attrition with its environment, “breaking, scraping, drilling, or otherwise changing the solid to the not-so-solid” (p. x). Leave it to palaeontologist Anthony J. Martin to write a witty book that boils over with fascinating studies about one of the more obscure corners of biology: bioerosion.

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Book review – The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed

7-minute read

Marine biologist Helen Scales returns for her third book with Bloomsbury’s popular science imprint Bloomsbury Sigma. After shells and fish, she now drags the reader down into the darkest depths of the deep sea. Both a beautifully written exploration of the ocean’s otherworldly wonders and a searing exposé of the many threats they face, The Brilliant Abyss is Scales’s most strident book to date.

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