The strangest animals on Earth read like inventions

Medieval bestiaries have a reputation for making things up. That reputation is deserved, but it is also unfair, because the people compiling them were mostly working from descriptions carried across continents by travellers who had themselves been working from descriptions. By the time an animal reached the page it had passed through enough retellings to acquire a moral, a symbolic meaning, and occasionally a second head.

The modern cataloguer has the opposite difficulty. The animals can be checked. And once checked, a great many of them turn out to be less plausible than the inventions.

A bestiary with the facts left in

The Big, Bad Book of Beasts runs from the aardvark to the zonkey and treats the world's most curious creatures with encyclopedic seriousness. It is a modern bestiary in the original sense, an ordered catalogue of animals with their lore attached, except that here the lore sits alongside the science rather than replacing it.

The zonkey is a useful example of the problem. A zebra crossed with a donkey sounds like something a fourteenth century compiler would invent to fill a gap in the alphabet. It is documented, photographed, and entirely real. The aardvark, an animal whose name exists mainly to start dictionaries, is a nocturnal insect eater built along lines that no committee would have approved.

Why weird animals hold attention

Search behaviour tells the story. Enormous numbers of people look up weird animals every month, and they are not looking for taxonomy. They are looking for the specific pleasure of learning that the world is less sensible than advertised.

That pleasure has a shape to it. It requires the strangeness to be true, because a made up creature is only as interesting as the person who made it up. A real one carries the weight of having evolved that way, over millions of years, for reasons that presumably made sense at the time.

The same method, pointed at the living

The approach here is the one that runs through all of Michael Largo's encyclopedic work. Take a subject everyone assumes they already understand, do the research nobody else bothered with, and deliver it illustrated, organized, and dark enough around the edges to stay interesting.

It is the method that produced Final Exits and won the Bram Stoker Award, applied here to creatures that are still breathing. The instinct is identical. Only the subjects changed.

The companion volume

The animal kingdom turns out to be no more sensible than the garden, which is the argument of the companion book. The Big, Bad Book of Botany does for plants what this one does for animals, and the two are best read together, ideally by someone who wanted to feel calm about the natural world.

More on that side of things in the piece on the deadliest plants in the world. The full set of illustrated reference books sits in the encyclopedic catalog.

Who this is for

Anyone who collects strange facts the way the aardvark collects ants. The format rewards browsing, the wit is dry, and the facts are checked, which in a genre that has historically preferred sea serpents counts as a genuine innovation.