Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Extraordinary Places

Alex Riley's Super Natural is a beautiful bestiary, a compendium of Earth's most interesting extremophiles who show us how life persists and even thrives in the most difficult circumstances. Surprising and oddly reassuring. * Cal Flyn, award-winning author of Islands of Abandonment * A celebration of the most extreme, extraordinary, and eccentric things that life is capable of. Alex Riley writes with joy and passion, and each page brings a new revelation about the resiliency of life. * Steve Brusatte, University of Edinburgh palaeontologist and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs * Super Natural is a book filled with nature's wonders: painted turtles that don't take a breath for six months, kangaroo rats that survive without drinking water, icefish with no haemoglobin in the Antarctic and bar-headed geese that migrate across the Himalaya at 7000 metres. It's about resilience, endurance and ingenuity - about finding a niche or a different way of being alive - and it's a combination that gives hope in our troubled times. * Andrea Wulf, award-winning author of The Invention of Nature * Superb... This readable and authoritative book is a rich source of information about a host of fascinating organisms... They provide a timely reminder of how evolution, over long timescales, has enabled species to adapt to the multitude of different ecological niches provided by our irreplaceable planet. * Times Literary Supplement * Deeply researched and wide-ranging, Super Natural is a veritable smorgasbord of astonishing facts about our planet's most resilient creatures. Alex Riley is an eagle-eyed, golden-hearted, and entertaining guide, adept at toggling between the micro and macro, attuned to both the humour and awe of the natural world, and never failing to provide his each and every subject with the loving attention it deserves. * Ferris Jabr, New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Earth * A thrilling and original way to explore nature - the science is fascinating. * Tristan Gooley, Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Read a Tree * It is curiously heartening to discover, from Alex Riley's brilliantly researched catalogue of resilient species, that life has a way of surviving any calamity. He cheerfully disproves all one's assumptions about life forms needing oxygen or light, and not to be fried, crushed, frozen or irradiated. At a time when extinctions are thought to be accelerating because of climate change and human development, it somehow filled me with hope to read that out there in apparently inhospitable places life is finding a way. * Charles Clover, award-winning author of The End of the Line * Super Natural is a mind-expanding romp through Earth's most extreme environments and the astonishing creatures who flourish in them. With awe and curiosity, Alex Riley plumbs the abyssal plains, the polar ice caps, and every habitat in between to reveal the tenacity, diversity, and flat-out weirdness of life on our harsh, hospitable planet. * Ben Goldfarb, award-winning author of Crossings * A lively and fascinating exploration of how life not only persists, but thrives at the extremes. By bringing these often shocking edges into vivid focus, we come to see the whole of life, ourselves included, more clearly. * David George Haskell, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Sounds Wild and Broken. * A fascinating portrait of how life survives despite radiation, desiccation, the heat of the Sahara, freezing polar temperatures, total darkness, extended famine, lack of oxygen and the oceans' abyssal depths... Riley writes with levity and self-deprecating humour. * Guardian * In this entertaining romp through life's outliers, Riley marvels at the resilience and ingenuity of many organisms and introduces you to some of the truly mind-boggling conditions under which they not only survive, but often thrive. * NHBS * Filled with striking stories, vivid descriptions, and meaningful science, this is a fascinating account of resilience. * Publishers Weekly * Exhilarating. Super Natural is a carnival of life's most extraordinary innovations. * David Farrier, author of Nature's Genius *