The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Welcome to the blog of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings .  I posted more than a thousand entries between February 2008 and February...

Conclusion page 377: mappa mundi . As Caleb Scharf writes in Gravity's Engines , “Our current map of the known universe contains a...

Chapter 27: Zebrafish page 370: what we may...learn . Recent advances include visualizations of the activity of nearly every cell in th...

Harlequin shrimp (page 357). Heaps of Yeti crabs here Chapter 26: Yeti Crab NPR's On Point featured this chapter as an excerpt ...

In the Page-Turner blog of The New Yorker James Guida says that The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is about earth’s adventure as a whole...

Sea pig Chapter 25: Xenophyophore page 343: undersea mountains, abyssal plains . Deeper still are trenches, which teem with microsc...

Horned owl Chapter 24: Xenoglaux  page 334: tipping point .  Some scientists say an Arctic thaw may be the first in a cascade .  ...

I talked to Tom Ashbrook for On Point on NPR today. The talk is available to listen again here . I referred to a poem by Les Murray. ...

Chapter 23: Waterbear page 322 A greater and more durable [human] presence in space . John Fallows looks at a future mining the Moon an...

Mnemiopsis leidyi Chapter 22: Venus's Girdle page 316: [Cteonophore] lineage is uncertain . A major for reason for this is that t...

Rhinoceros beetle Chapter 21: Unicorn page 307: Unicorn's horn was the Viagra of its day. Rhino horn is the "natural" ...

Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah I've written about Weird Life by David Toomey for the May edition of The Literary Rev...

Escher meets Ouroboros. Armadillo girdled lizard, southern Africa Chapter 20: Thorny Devil Page 297: analogous systems...in other arid...

The verdict in the May 15 edition of Library Journal : This readable volume...will appeal to the serious reader with broad interests in sc...

Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were s...

Chapter 19: Sea butterfly page 285: the oceans have absorbed...much of the additional heat . See Missing heat found in oceans, global...

An additional note for chapter 13 : page 204: two states of...trying to live utterly in the moment, and...trying to live in memory of...

Chapter 18: Right whale page 270: Balaenidae .   The evolution of baleen whales may be linked to the freezing of Antarctica from abou...

'Let us deliver mankind from the ancient, universal tyranny...of gravity! ' Chapter 17: Quetzalcoatlus Choosing an animal begi...

Ocean sunfish Chapter 16: Pufferfish  page 242: appetite...out of control : especially when food is painstakingly engineered to addi...