Weird Biology

From glowing mushrooms to zombie bugs, shape-shifting creatures, immortal jellyfish, brain-hacking parasites, and plants that eat meat—Weird Biology dives headfirst into the strangest life-forms on Earth. This isn’t your typical science book. It’s a wild safari through evolution’s most shocking experiments, the bizarre survival tricks nature invented, and the organisms so odd you’d swear they came from a sci-fi movie. Each chapter begins with a short, fun introduction, followed by 40 bite-sized facts that bring the weirdness to life. Every fact is written in an exciting, ...

From entomologist Barrett Klein comes a buzz-worthy exploration of the many ways insects have affected human society, history, and culture Insects surround us. They fuel life on Earth through their roles as pollinators, predators, and prey, but rarely do we consider the outsize influence they...

Book # 5 in the Strangest Animals series. Describes some of the most unusual mammals from around the globe.

A rollicking, myth-busting history of sex that moves from historical attempts at birth control to Hildegard von Bingen’s treatise on the female orgasm, demystifying plenty of urban legends along the way. Roman physicians told female patients they should sneeze out as much semen as possible...

From split-gill mushrooms to duck-billed platypuses, the spectacular science of sexual reproduction and creation of biodiversity on Earth Let’s talk about sex. Not boring, human sex, but the endlessly fascinating, varied, and complex forms of reproduction in the rest of the natural world...

In recent years, scientists have hypothesized life-forms that can only be called "weird": organisms that live off acid rather than water, microbes that thrive at temperatures and pressure levels so extreme that their cellular structures should break down, perhaps even organisms that reproduce without DNA. Some of these strange life-forms, unrelated to all life we know, might be nearby: on rock surfaces in the American southwest, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or even in our own bodies. Some, stranger still, might live in Martian permafrost, swim in the dark oceans of Jupiter's moons, or survive in the exotic ices on comets.