If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chickenegg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell,prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blueeggs of theblackbird?Everyegg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of theanimal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life onEarth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon,animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.InInfinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on amind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period andCarboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the ageof dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggswould evolve from out of the sea, be set by animals into soils, sands, canyonsand mudflats, be dropped in nests wrapped in silk, hung in stick nests intrees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.Whetherbelonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objectsthat have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honedby natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their rolein the tapestry of life can be told.
