Life Wonders Of Life: A Fantastic Voyage Through Nature

Here we have an endless stream of exotica—exotic living things growing from the ground and exotic critters of all shapes and sizes, crawling, bounding, and flying around. As LIFE's editors put it in their "This is a wild book." In its pages, we have animals as big as trucks and plants as big as small towns. We have flowers that dance for our pleasure and flowers that shyly hide underground, flowers that can kill animals and flowers that can heal animals. We have a teeny tiny bird that is directly descended from T. Rex and a truly enormous bird that can't fly but can run 45 miles an hour. We have a lizard king that could rip you apart and a lizard princeling that walks on water. This is a wild, wild book. It focuses on life at the far fringes—the biggest, toughest, gentlest, rarest, and weirdest species. The book creates an astonishing image of the world around us, a world more diverse and strange than even the most imaginative reader might expect. The remarkable photography highlights these stories, with descriptions that will boggle the mind, sharing facts like how a carnivorous plant's trapping mechanism often doubles as its stomach, or that an elephant seal can hold its breath for up to two hours when diving. The book also includes five photographic prints from the LIFE archive that can be extracted and hung on your wall, with the original picture still visible beneath once removed.