What, do you suppose, is the closest living relative of the hippopotamus? The rhinoceros, perhaps? The pig? In fact, it’s the whale. [D]id you know … that some cuckoo chicks have a coloured pattern on one wing’s feathers that resembles a second false beak, to trick their unwitting foster mothers into feeding them twice?
Richard Dawkins’s lovely new book is an old-fashioned miscellany of such zoological surprises, lightly structured by the titular conjecture: that one day it may be possible for scientists to read off details about an animal’s ancestral environments from its DNA.
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The “genetic book of the dead” is a sort of palimpsest of all our ancestors and the worlds they lived in. Humans, for example, still have some of the genes that probably gave our ancestors a more advanced sense of smell than ours, but they’re no longer used, and have become “pseudogenes”. Similarly surprising phenomena emerge as we romp through fascinating tales of cats, fish and prawns.
