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Tortoise, Galápagos giant

© Frans Lanting/FLPA

INTRODUCTION

Nature’s Babies is an unashamed celebration of the fully technicoloured glory of the natural world itself. The seemingly infinite variety of different baby shapes and sizes is of course down to the cleverest and most powerful beast of them all: evolution. What else would have created babies that at one end of the spectrum are impossibly cute, yet at the other end would not look out of place in the most off-the-wall science fiction novels?

Parenting skills can vary enormously from the non-existent to the lavish. For some animals being born is a rude awakening into a harsh, unforgiving world with no parental care whatsoever – just ask leatherback turtle hatchlings as they have to run the gauntlet to sea!

This book showcases some of the weirdest and wonderful stories of the babies’ development, too. Who would have thought, for example, that a grey kangaroo’s baby is born no larger than a kidney bean, and from the moment it enters the world has the most daunting journey to complete even before it will be able to feed for the first time? And exactly why do Galápagos tortoises take an astonishingly long 25 years to reach maturity?

Whilst focusing on the babies, this book will hopefully also test our own notions of how we humans fit into the natural world. We think of our birth, babyhood and adolescence as normal, but how ‘normal’ compared to other animals are we? Whilst we perhaps arrogantly think of the human race as producing model babies and parental skills that are unsurpassed, do we in fact have something to learn from our wild cousins? After reading Nature’s Babies, you decide!