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Among the offspring of humans and other animals are occasional individuals that are malformed in whole or in part. The most grossly abnormal of these have been referred to from ancient times as monsters, because their birth was thought to foretell doom; the less severely affected are usually known as anomalies. Animal Anomalies aims to dig deeply into the cellular and molecular processes of embryonic development that go awry in such exceptional situations. It focuses on the physical mechanisms of how genes instruct cells to build anatomy, as well as the underlying forces of evolution that shaped these mechanisms over eons of geologic time. The narrative is framed in a historical perspective that should help students trying to make sense of these complex subjects. Each chapter is written in the style of a Sherlock Holmes story, starting with the clues and ending with a solution to the mystery.
Preface
Part I. Frogs:
1. The introspective frog
2. Two-headed tadpoles
3. Extra-legged frogs
Part II. Flies:
4. The double-jointed fly
5. The four-winged fly
6. The naked fly
Part III. Dogs:
7. The Shar-Pei
8. The bully whippet
9. The Great Pyrenees
Part IV. Cats:
10. The blotched tabby
11. The Siamese cat
12. The calico cat
Lewis I. Held, Jr. is Associate Professor of Developmental Genetics in the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University. He is a fly geneticist who has taught human embryology for 35 years. He studied molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, 1973), investigated bristle patterning under John Gerhart at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, 1977), and conducted postdoctoral research with Peter Bryant and Howard Schneiderman at the University of California, Irvine (1977–86). This is his sixth scholarly monograph, following Models for Embryonic Periodicity (Karger, 1992), Imaginal Discs (Cambridge, 2002), Quirks of Human Anatomy (Cambridge, 2009), How the Snake Lost its Legs (Cambridge, 2014), and Deep Homology? (Cambridge, 2017).
