On any night in early June, if you stand on the right beaches of
America's East Coast, you can travel back in time all the way to
the Jurassic. For as you watch, thousands of horseshoe crabs will
emerge from the foam and scuttle up the beach to their spawning
grounds, as they've done, nearly unchanged, for more than 440
million years.
Horseshoe crabs are far from the only contemporary manifestation of
Earth's distant past, and in "Relics," world-renowned zoologist and
photographer Piotr Naskrecki leads readers on an unbelievable
journey through those lingering traces of a lost world. With camera
in hand, he travels the globe to create a words-and-pictures
portrait of our planet like no other, a time-lapse tour that
renders Earth's colossal age comprehensible, visible in creatures
and habitats that have persisted, nearly untouched, for hundreds of
millions of years.
Naskrecki begins by defining the concept of a relic--a creature or
habitat that, while acted upon by evolution, remains remarkably
similar to its earliest manifestations in the fossil record. Then
he pulls back the Cambrian curtain to reveal relic after
eye-popping relic: katydids, ancient reptiles, horsetail ferns,
majestic magnolias, and more, all depicted through stunning
photographs and first-person accounts of Naskrecki's time studying
them and watching their interactions in their natural habitats.
Then he turns to the habitats themselves, traveling to such remote
locations as the Atewa Plateau of Africa, the highlands of Papua
New Guinea, and the lush forests of the Guyana Shield of South
America--a group of relatively untrammeled ecosystems that are the
current end point of staggeringly long, uninterrupted histories
that have made them our best entryway to understanding what the
prehuman world looked, felt, sounded, and even smelled like.
The stories and images of Earth's past assembled in "Relics" are
beautiful, breathtaking, and unmooring, plunging the reader into
the hitherto incomprehensible reaches of deep time. We emerge
changed, astonished by the unbroken skein of life on Earth and
attentive to the hidden heritage of our planet's past that
surrounds us.
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