Horseshoe Crabs & Velvet Worms

This morning I finished reading Richard Fortey's Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms: The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind. Because sometimes I wake up at 3 AM and can't go back to sleep. It was a Christmas gift from my parents although I'd dare say my mother picked it out. She's the biologist. Also it was on my list, as are many books that get reviewed in Science magazine.

Feynman begins his Lectures on a beach: "if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sound, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought. Any other spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations. For example: Is the sand other than the rocks? That is, is the sand perhaps nothing but a great number of very tiny stones? Is the moon a great rock? If we understood rocks, would we also understand the sand and the moon? Is the wind a sloshing of the air analogous to the sloshing motion of the water in the sea? What common features do different movements have? What is common to different kinds of sound? How many different colors are there? And so on. In this way we try gradually to analyze all things, to put together things which at first sight look different, with the hope that we may be able to reduce the number of different things and thereby understand them better. A few hundred years ago, a method was devised to find partial answers to such questions. Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method." I tend to find myself at some shore at least once or twice a year, contemplating existence.

Fortey takes us from beach to beach (and occasionally inland) to visit the rarities - the survivors who have changed little through mass extinction after mass extinction. I grew up going to the Atlantic coast of North America, so the horseshoe crab is a familiar friend. Until reading this book, however, I had no idea that rather than iron it uses copper in the oxygen carrying molecule in its blood. This book is filled with similar gems about other species and well worth the read.