Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys“If you have any interest in life beyond your own, you should read this book.”
Biologist Rob Dunn’s Every Little Thing is the story of man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E.O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity’s unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world—from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars. |
From inside the book
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Page 3
... collected the animals and plants and named what we found. Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people. They traveled along routes about which we continue to ...
... collected the animals and plants and named what we found. Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people. They traveled along routes about which we continue to ...
Page 16
... collected more than a hundred species of plants. The vast majority of them had local, and in most cases Cavineño, names, and many of them also had uses, whether for house materials, medicine, or just to make strings on which to tie pet ...
... collected more than a hundred species of plants. The vast majority of them had local, and in most cases Cavineño, names, and many of them also had uses, whether for house materials, medicine, or just to make strings on which to tie pet ...
Page 21
... collecting so many damned plant samples (which I bore in my pack). We waded through the wet savannas of anacondas, mosquitoes, and sand flies, and of gen- eral damp malaise. There was water, water everywhere and coinciden- tally, just a ...
... collecting so many damned plant samples (which I bore in my pack). We waded through the wet savannas of anacondas, mosquitoes, and sand flies, and of gen- eral damp malaise. There was water, water everywhere and coinciden- tally, just a ...
Page 22
... collecting. Around us were unnamed species, and hence work to do. It has been said, “The sciences are the light that will lead the people that wander in the dark- ness.” We needed to be led out of the dark, but were tired and still too ...
... collecting. Around us were unnamed species, and hence work to do. It has been said, “The sciences are the light that will lead the people that wander in the dark- ness.” We needed to be led out of the dark, but were tired and still too ...
Page 27
... collecting. With the on-again, off-again help of local Sami guides, Linnaeus would continue both by day and, since this was summer in the Arctic, by the light of the midnight sun. The going had become “dreadful.” He and the assistants ...
... collecting. With the on-again, off-again help of local Sami guides, Linnaeus would continue both by day and, since this was summer in the Arctic, by the light of the midnight sun. The going had become “dreadful.” He and the assistants ...
Contents
23 | |
The Invisible World | 40 |
Part II | 57 |
Dividing the Cell | 133 |
Grafting the Tree of Life | 149 |
Origin Stories | 181 |
Looking Out | 193 |
To Squeeze Life from a Stone | 209 |
The Wrong Elephant? | 224 |
What Remains | 246 |
Endnotes | 257 |
Index | 265 |
Other editions - View all
Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria ... Rob Dunn Limited preview - 2009 |
Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria ... Rob Dunn Limited preview - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
Alvin Amazon animals archaea army ants astrobiologists ATBI bacteria Bates beetles began believe biologists biology canopy carabid Carl Sagan Carl Woese Cavinas Cavineño cells centrioles chloroplasts Ciftcioglu collected Costa Rica creatures deep deep-sea vents discovered discovery diversity DNA barcoding Drake E. O. Wilson endosymbiosis estimate eukaryotes everything evolutionary Frank Drake genes Guanacaste human hundred hydrogen sulfide ideas imagined insects Janzen Kajander kind knew later Leeuwenhoek lineages Linnaeus Linnaeus’s living looked Lowell Lynn Margulis Margulis’s Mars Martian methanogens microbes microscope mites mitochondria monkeys moths named species nanobacteria nearly ocean organisms perhaps plants Rettenmeyer Riberalta rock Royal Society rRNA Sami samples scientists seafloor seemed seen space species on Earth story subsurface sumichrasti Swammerdam symbiosis telescope Terry Erwin theory things thought thousand trees tropical forest University Wallace Wirsen wondered