Why I Love Science: Animals
10 July 2011A while ago I wrote a series of posts on the music that was, in my youth, formative for my eventual tastes. I’m now going to write some blog entries on the stuff that made me love science.
One of the first thing that made me think about science was a huge, tome-like book of animals that lived on my parents’ bookshelf when I was young. I don’t recall what it was called, or who published it (I suspect it might have been National Geographic). It might even still be there when I visit my family next week.
It was magical to me. It was big, thick and heavy. It had a little bit about extinct animals and the geological life of the earth. But mostly it was just about the many groups of animals that existed on the planet today.
There were all sorts of high-quality photographs of leopards and whales and snakes and voles and eagles and spiders and much more. It was presented fairly rigorously, often with latin names for the animals and descriptions of species, orders and and phyla. It was big, and felt exhaustive. I spent years looking at all the exotic animals within in, amazed at the range of life and at the diversity of species.
That big animal book, whatever it was, was incredibly important in forming my fascination with the living natural world.
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