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The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg cover

The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird's Egg

Tim Birkhead

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3

score

#3391 of 3,809 books · #489 in Science & Technology

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize (2016).

A bird's egg is a nearly perfect survival capsule--an external womb--and one of natural selection's most wonderful creations. Renowned ornithologist Tim Birkhead opens this gripping story as a female guillemot chick hatches, already carrying her full quota of tiny eggs within her undeveloped ovary. As she grows into adulthood, only a few of her eggs mature, are released into the oviduct, and are fertilized by sperm stored from copulation that took place days or weeks earlier. Within a matter of hours, the fragile yolk is surrounded by albumen and the whole is gradually encased within a turquoise jewel of a shell. Soon the fully formed egg is expelled onto a rocky ledge, where it will be incubated for four weeks before a chick emerges and the life cycle begins again. THE MOST PERFECT THING is about how eggs in general are made, fertilized, developed, and hatched. Birkhead uses birds' eggs as wondrous portals into natural history, enlivened by the stories of naturalists and scientists, including Birkhead and his students, whose discoveries have advanced current scientific knowledge of reproduction.

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Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN-13
9781632863690
Topics
Bird eggs and reproductionOrnithologyNatural history and evolution

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