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Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary engineering: the egg. It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.
If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chicken egg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blue eggs of the blackbird?
Every egg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.
In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.
Whether belonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their role in the tapestry of life can be told.
Jules Howard is a zoologist, science writer and broadcaster, whose most recent book, Wonderdog (Bloomsbury Sigma), won the 2022 Barker Book Prize for non-fiction. He writes on a host of topics relating to zoology and wildlife conservation, and appears regularly in BBC Wildlife Magazine and on radio and TV, including on BBC's The One Show, Nature and The Living World as well as BBC Breakfast and Radio 4's Today programme. Jules also runs a social enterprise that has brought almost 100,000 young people closer to the natural world. He lives in Northamptonshire with his wife and two children.
"Jules Howard's egg's-eye view of evolution is dripping with fascinating insights"
– Alice Roberts, author of Ancestors
"A startlingly beautiful exploration of evolution's crucibles of creation"
– Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred
"Mind-bending in the best possible ways [...] a joy to read"
– Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss
"Finally, the egg gets the recognition it deserves in this wonderfully evocative telling of its journey through time and place"
– Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century and Transcendence
"One of my favourite science writers"
– Lucy Cooke, author of Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal
"This is as fun and engaging as science writing gets, and by the end of the book, it's astounding how much you've learned about the history of life."
– Steve Brusatte, author of The Rise and Reign of the Mammals
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