Inside Nature’s Giants

With a foreword by Richard Dawkins, and based on the BAFTA award-winning Channel 4 TV series, Inside Nature’s Giants gets under the skin of the largest animals on the planet. See them as you've never seen them before – from the inside out.

Inside Nature’s Giants explores the anatomy of the largest animals on the planet to reveal how these amazing creatures really work. Rather than simply telling you how an animal behaves, the book features dissection, CGI and wildlife photography to show how millions of years of evolution have enabled animals to thrive across the world. This is natural history as you’ve never seen it before – from the inside out.

Join the Inside Nature’s Giants team of scientists and anatomical experts, including, among others, veterinary scientist Mark Evans, enthusiastic, scalpel-wielding anatomist Joy Reidenberg, science presenter Simon Watt and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, as they unlock the secrets behind some of nature's most extraordinary beasts.

Why doesn’t a giraffe keel over and faint, when its head is so far above its heart? Why are crocodiles hopeless at chewing, when they have the strongest bite of all animals, and why does a giant squid have three hearts and pass food through its brain? By rolling up their sleeves to delve into these animals the team discover the answers to these, and many other fascinating, questions, revealing how evolution by natural selection is responsible for the bizarre biology of elephants, sharks, giraffes, big cats, hippos, crocodiles, camels, whales, kangaroos, giant squids and more.

Using an interactive approach, Inside Nature’s Giants offers an exciting, alternative take on natural history. By opening the single- and double-page gatefolds readers can go beneath the skins of the animals to experience for themselves how evolution has shaped the anatomy of some of nature’s most magnificent animals.

Reviews

Praise for the TV series:

‘Ironically for a programme about cold, dead beasts, what’s great about Inside Nature’s Giants is the warm humanism of everyone involved. These people aren’t dissecting corpses as part of some dry educational exercise: they’re delving, exploring, learning new things themselves, and doing so with palpable excitement. They display such infectious enthusiasm for their work, such quiet admiration of nature, it’s impossible not to get drawn in yourself.’
Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn
Guardian

‘Enthralling, educational and wonderfully weird.’
Daily Telegraph

‘Proof yet again that Earth holds creatures vastly stranger than any alien dreamed up for a sci-fi film.’
Sunday Express

About the author

David Dugan is the series producer of Inside Nature’s Giants and chairman of the independent production company Windfall Films. He has won many awards for his programmes, including Emmys, RTS Awards, and a BAFTA for Inside Nature’s Giants. He is editor and lead author of this book of the TV series.

Contributing authors include: Mark Evans, veterinary scientist and presenter; Joy Reidenberg, professor of comparative anatomy; Simon Watt, science presenter, and Jamie Lochhead, Alex Tate, Tom Mustill and Peter Fison from the Inside Nature’s Giants production team.