Evolution - Tapa dura

Unprecedented in its approach, the number and diversity of the species presented, and the quality of the photographs, Evolution is the book on how we came to be what we are. Spectacular, mysterious, elegant, or grotesque, the skeletons of the vertebrates that inhabit the earth today carry within them the imprint of an evolutionary process that has lasted several billion years. This book is the result of a dual approach, scientific as well as aesthetic, rigorous yet accessible. Each chapter is made up of a short text that illuminates one theme of the evolutionary process—repetition, adaptation, polymorphism, sexual selection, and more—and a series of exquisitely composed photographs of skeletons against a black background. Approximately three hundred photographs of whole skeletons or their details have been made possible by the French National Museum of Natural History. The reader learns, by experiencing each text and photograph together, how the structure of every creature has been shaped by its environmental and genetic inheritance.

JEAN-BAPTISTE DE PANAFIEU is a professor of natural sciences and a doctor of biological oceanography, as well as a documentarian and author.
Photographer PATRICK GRIES has photographed over two thousand artworks for the Quai Branly Museum and collaborated with the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.
LINDA ASHER is a former fiction editor at the New Yorker and the translator of works by writers such as Hugo, Simenon, and Kundera.