Infinite Life: A Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth

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If you think of an egg, what do you see in your minds eye A chicken egg, hardboiled A slimy mass of frogspawn Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory

Every egg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.
In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.

Whether belonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their role in the story of life can be told.

Author Bio

Jules Howard is a zoology correspondent, author, science-writer and broadcaster. He is a regular writer for The Guardian and Science Focus magazine, and regularly hosts and performs at a number of festivals including Wilderness Festival, Green Man Festival, Blue Dot Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival and Cheltenham Science Festival. Howard holds a Zoology Hons and Masters in Evolution from the University of Liverpool. Juless popular non-fiction books include award-winning Wonderdog: How the Science of Dogs Changed the Science of Life, (2022), and Death on Earth (2016) shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology book award.