From the author of The Selfish Gene comes a revolutionary, richly illustrated book that unlocks the door to a vivid, nuanced, and fascinating past. In this groundbreaking exploration of the power of Darwinian evolution, Richard Dawkins shows how the body, behavior, and genes of every living creature can be read as an archive of the worlds of its ancestors. In the future, a zoologist presented with a hitherto unknown animal will be able to decode its ancestral history—to read its unique “book of the dead.” Such readings are already uncovering the remarkable ways animals overcome obstacles, adapt to their environments, and develop remarkably similar ways of solving life’s problems.