Introduction

I don't know enough about life on this planet. Sure, I'm living one, and blogs are quite often devoted to a single person's experience of that life - I'm guilty of having started and left a few of those to rot myself.

With this one, I'm aiming to write a year's worth of posts about the awesome creatures who've shared the same planet with us. Recently, I've revived a childhood passion for extinct creatures and found there's so much more information available than there was when I grew up in the 1970s. I've somewhat shocked myself at how little I knew, and at how strange I saw many animals that still exist today. It shouldn't be that way; my (and your!) experience of animal life on this planet shouldn't be dogs, cats, and other.

I want to fill in the other. I want to look at everything from tiny creatures that have almost no record from hundreds of millions of years ago, to extinct megafauna, to modern living breathing animals that we may only know by name - but have no concept of how truly unique they are.

I'm not a biologist, and my childhood dream of becoming a great palaeontologist who traveled the world naming dinosaurs after her friends and publishing papers out the wazoo has long gone. I'm sure I'll make mistakes in the science (please correct me if you notice!) but I hope I'll inspire a few people to look more deeply into the wonderful beasts who've walked with us on this earth.