The Tree of Life

Combining cutting-edge genetics, a dollop of history and terrifically bizarre creatures, this endlessly entertaining and exciting account is essential reading. – Matthew CobbTelford is one of our generation’s most brilliant biologists and The Tree of Life is a wonderful and vivid guide to evolution’s marvels. – David George HaskellIf you’ve ever wondered how all of life is related, how we came to be, and how we know, then this brilliant and beautifully written book is for you. The greatest story ever told, presented with exemplary clarity and style. – Tim BlackburnRich with anecdote and infectious enthusiasm, The Tree of Life should delight anyone with even a passing interest in the miracle that is life on our planet. – Henry GeeBeautiful… a breezy and very accessible way to get readers to think like scientists, and to see the tangled branches of our near and distant relatives all at once. – Thomas HallidayA rollicking ride through the history of the natural world and the scientists who helped unravel it. Marvellous! – Seirian SumnerA breezy, scholarly, whimsical, rigorous and companionable guide to our family history. Few would have the nerve or the knowhow to attempt [this], Telford has both. Shrewd … a big-picture look at the biggest of pictures… this book is many things: a collection of colourful Just So stories and a cabinet of curiosities. Fundamentally The Tree of Life is a travel book. It starts at the beginning of things and goes all the way to the end … an extraordinary adventurous book. – Charles Foster * Times Literary Supplement *A great and straightforward guide to the tree of life: As zoologist Max Telford’s book makes clear, it is a wondrous thing … The Tree of Life is a millennia-spanning science-history book in the spirit of Thomas Halliday’s blockbusting Otherlands … [It] is a boon with a brilliant finale, in which he traces the 4 billion years or so from LUCA to Homo sapiens - and beyond. * New Scientist *Erudite, highly informed, and frequently amusing … compelling and memorable, even when discussing seemingly arcane details of worm anuses … A delight … Fantastic … I can heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in life on Earth, the scientific endeavor, and what it is to be human. – Yan Wong * Science *In his enjoyable and ambitious The Tree of Life, Max Telford, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, takes us on an exhilarating cartographic journey in which he attempts to map out the various rivers and tributaries that make up the basic infrastructure of life’s evolutionary history… Mr. Telford and his colleagues have devised systematic and often painstaking methods of tree-building that rationalize confounding factors. * Wall Street Journal *

Max Telford is an evolutionary biologist and the Jodrell Chair of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London where he founded the Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution and the Telford Lab. Max has won several awards for his research (including a visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford) and has spent the last three decades researching the shape of the tree of life, his broader aim to discover the earliest events in the evolution of the animal kingdom. He lives in London. This is his first book.