Taking Flight: How Animals Learned to Fly and Transformed Life on Earth

The miracle of flight as you've never seen it before: the evolutionary story of life on the wing. A bird flits overhead. It's something so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that sometimes we forget how incredible it is. In this exhilarating new book, meet fourteen flying species, each with their own extraordinary story to tell about life on earth. Encounter the first fluttering insect of 300 million years ago and the crested pterosaurs of the Mesozoic Era; the hummingbirds that co-evolved with rainforest flowers; and the wonders of the puffins and the penguins, dragonflies and monarch butterflies, with which we share the planet today. Conjuring lost worlds, ancient species and ever-evolving ecologies, Taking Flight is a mind-expanding feat of the imagination, a close encounter with flight in its many shape-shifting forms that continue to transform life on Earth today. '[Lev Parikian] brings a sense of infectious enthusiasm to his account of the evolution of flight in the natural world... combining a wealth of information with a sense of wonder.' Observer.