#OneHundredAnimals
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jackdashby.bsky.social
Whoop whoop! My first book, Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects is out again in a new reprint! 🤩
It explores the *astonishing* things we can learn about the natural world from incredible specimens in natural history #museums. Go get your hands on it! #OneHundredAnimals
A stack of the book Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects, fanned out on a table
May 22, 2026 at 7:03 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
The first object is the best thing that has ever evolved: the #platypus.
#Platypuses hunt with their eyes and ears closed. Their bills detect electrical impulses from their prey's muscles, including their heartbeats. The males are also the world's only seasonanly venomous animal. #OneHundredAnimals
The head, hands and sholders of a taxidermy platypus.
May 23, 2026 at 12:53 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
12. Long before birds, pterosaurs and bats, #insects were the first animals to evolve powered flight - around 350 million years ago. From there, their diversity came to be unsurpassed: most of the world's known animal species are insects.
#OneHundredAnimals
A fossil square limestone slab showing a clear fossil impression of a dragonfly
June 1, 2026 at 6:59 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
Not a bad way to spend the afternoon: in the week between my third and fourth books coming out, I'm starting a new writing project by revisiting my first. #OneHundredAnimals
Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects sits on one knee, with a notebook and pen on the other, with a cricket match going on in the background.
May 3, 2025 at 2:46 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
2. Because they are so unlike all other animals, until the 1820s #sponges were believed to be plants. Robert Grant (@uclgrantmuseum.bsky.social founder) demonstrated that they produce waste and their sex cells move: helping to prove that sponges were in fact simple animals. #OneHundredAnimals
A dried sponge specimen in a glass dome
May 24, 2026 at 11:45 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
9. This is not a coral: it is a bryozoan. These "moss animals" can form colonies like #corals. Each individual in the colony is only 1mm long, but it has a simple brain. They were one of the simple animals that #Darwin's teacher Robert Grant used to enthuse him about #evolution. #OneHundredAnimals
A dried specimen of the byrozoan Flustra, on a black wooden base.
May 28, 2026 at 7:24 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
16. Graptolites are a huge group of #fossils which appeared half a billion years ago. As they vary greatly through time, they are helpful for working out the age of fossils around them. Their closest relatives are sea angels, in a group known as hemichordates.
#OneHundredAnimals
A slab of dark grey rock, with straight, light grey fossil graptolites criss-crossing across its surface
June 3, 2026 at 5:35 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
3. Sea anemones release neurotoxins into their victims by firing harpoons at 2 metres per second. These amazing speeds are generated by structures within single stinging cells.
Also, anemones & their relatives jellyfish & corals are animals that have mouths but do not have heads. #OneHundredAnimals
Three nineteenth-century wax models of sea anemones on a black wooden base.
May 25, 2026 at 4:28 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
17. Lancelets are tiny eel-like filter-feeding animals which lack a spine. Nearly all invertebrates have a central nerve chord running along their bellies. In lancelets it runs along their backs - they resemble the earliest chordates: the group in which vertebrates evolved. #OneHundredAnimals
A round jar with several brown preserved lancelets. The label reads: CEPHALOCHORDATA Amphioxus lanceolatus Plymouth, 1960
June 6, 2026 at 2:11 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
8. It's often said that we live in the "Age of Mammals", but mammal species are outnumbered twenty to one by #molluscs (like this king scallop). So are we really in the Age of Molluscs? 🐌🐙🦑🐚🦪 #OneHundredAnimals
A wax model of a king scallop on a wooden plinth (the shell is real but the soft body parts are sculpted from wax)
May 27, 2026 at 3:26 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
4. Comb jellies have nerves that are unlike any other animal group, suggesting that their nervous system evolved completely independently. They may be the very earliest group to split off on the first animal branch of the tree of life.
#OneHundredAnimals
A comb jelly preserved on a microscope slide
May 26, 2026 at 7:12 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
10. Brachiopods resemble bivalve #molluscs (like clams), with a pair of opposing shells, but they have evolved independently. Brachiopods are roughly symmetrical left-to-right, while bivalves are roughly symmetrical top-to-bottom. #OneHundredAnimals
Three fossil bivalves, showing that they have a line of symmetry down the midline of their body, so they are symmetrical left to right, rather than having two symmetrical parts of the shell, like bivalve molluscs do
May 29, 2026 at 6:31 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
Wowsers, not only is #NaturesMemory top of Amazon's e-book charts for #Zoology, but it's also top for all Biological Sciences, and number 3 for all of Science & Maths!📚
PLUS, I actually have two books in the Zoology Top Ten, with Animal Kingdom ( #OneHundredAnimals ) in there as well! 🤩
Amazon's Zoology best sellers, with Nature's Memory at Number 1 and Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects at Number 10. Amazon's Biological Sciences best sellers, with Nature's Memory at Number 1. Amazon's Science & Maths best sellers, with Nature's Memory at Number 3.
May 27, 2026 at 4:50 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
15. We are more closely related to this sea potato than we are to bees or octopuses.
Taxonomically speaking, there is no such thing as an "invertebrate". Echinoderms (including starfish, sea urchins and sea potatoes) are on the same evolutionary branch as vertebrates. 🐙⭐🦒 #OneHundredAnimals
A preserved sea potato in a rectangular glass jar. The specimen is rounded, not quite a sphere, with brown spiny protusions across its surface, except in a five-pointed star-shaped bare patch that spreads across the upper surface
June 2, 2026 at 4:29 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
What's the only ethical way to fit #OneHundredAnimals in a Christmas stocking? 🎁🎄🎅
"Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects" tells 100 of nature's most incredible stories, through specimens in natural history #museums. 🐹🐨🐒🦍🐣🦟🦋🐝🐍🐛🦄🦫🦘
The cover of "Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects" by Jack Ashby, showing a several specimens (a taxidermy bird of paradise; a pinned bumblebee; a viper skull; a chimp skeleton; a pinned butterfly; and a preserved sea horse) on a green background
December 8, 2025 at 8:02 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
14. Penis #worms are named for their appearance. They have a mouth on a swollen proboscis surrounded by curved spines. As body fluid is pushed in & out of the proboscis, it engorges & deflates - the mouth is turned inside out so that the spines dig through sediment or engulf food. #OneHundredAnimals
A small preserved penis worm inside a large rectangular jar. The label reads: CLASS: Priapuloidea PRIAPULIS Sp Loc: St Andrews Mus. No. M.11
June 2, 2026 at 6:51 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
11. Velvet #worms shoot streams of glue out of modified face-legs (legs on their faces) in order to trap prey. Some species hunt cooperatively like lions. #OneHundredAnimals
A specimen jaw showing three preserved velvet worms mounted at different heights within the jar, as if floating (in reality they are stiched to a glass back plate)
May 29, 2026 at 11:48 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
18. Although they resemble simple sponges, or wet paper bags, sea squirts have a brain, a heart and a kidney-like excretory system. They are the vertebrates' closest relatives. (And this one has three parastic #molluscs living inside it). #OneHundredAnimals
A sea squirt. It is a ghostly white, semi-translucent blob, with a slightly more opaque centre. Three brown seed-like lumps can be seen - these are the parastic molluscs
June 7, 2026 at 6:50 AM
jackdashby.bsky.social
7. Segmented #worms (annelids) can have reinforced jaws (sometimes using metal) and several kinds of eye, including light/dark sensors, complex eyes with retinas and lenses, and compound eyes comparable to insects. Not all of their eyes are on their heads. 🪱👀 #OneHundredAnimals
A preserved king ragworm, showing massive tough black jaws. The specimen is held in place in its container with criss-crossing white thread
May 27, 2026 at 12:13 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
6. Bootlace #worms are considered the longest animals on Earth. They are reported to reach 55 metres long (but less than 1cm wide). However, when disturbed they can rapidly retract themselves, which complicates measurements. 🪱📏
Blue #whales "only" reach 33.5m long.
#OneHundredAnimals
A specimen jar containing a tangled brown worm in clear liquid. The label reads "Lineus longissima. Now in 60% alc -glycerol"
May 26, 2026 at 3:44 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
13. Four out of every five living animals are believed to be a nematode #worm: they are the most abundant group on Earth. Nematode #worms are more commonly less than a millimetre than more than a metre long, but the biggest reaches 9 metres (aptly a parasite on #whales). #OneHundredAnimals
A round glass jar containing tens of pink preserved nematode worms. The jar has a paper label with the typewriter text that reads: NEMATODA Ascaris lumbricoides var. suis. Female + 1 male
June 1, 2026 at 2:29 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
5. Parasitic flatworms that live inside other animals have no need for a gut: they are bathed in their food.
Flatworms that do have guts can push them out through their mouths to envelope their food (and they appear to have no use for an anus, so they've lost it). #OneHundredAnimals
A microscope slide showing a flatworm
May 26, 2026 at 1:02 PM
jackdashby.bsky.social
Objects 2-19 in the rundown of my #OneHundredAnimals book make up the Understanding Diversity section, highlighting the most common ways of being an animal (invertebrates outnumber vertebrates 20 to 1).
The cover of Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects by Jack Ashby A screenshot of the introduction to the Understanding Diversity section: PUTTING ANIMALS IN ORDER The human desire to classify is perhaps at its strongest when it comes to natural history. From our childhood years we are taught to put the animals we encounter in museums, living rooms and the natural environment into discrete categories. At school and on television we are taught the differences between groups like amphibians and fish. Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the greatest biologists of the nineteenth century and a man who can take a lot of credit for making Darwin’s work accepted by the Victorian scientific community, said this: To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around.* He was right. Knowing what you are looking at – in both nature and the art gallery in Huxley’s analogy – is half the joy. But we can’t become ‘instructed’ in everything. The world is an endless purveyor of wonders too numerable to memorise. To make sense of the 1.5 million species so far described (and there may be 100 million undescribed species), natural historians have to come up with a system for arranging them and information about them. This proved tricky until 1735, when Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus proposed a system for putting species into hierarchical groups, and it stuck. In today’s terms, a rat can be a rat, a rodent, a mammal, a vertebrate and an animal all at once. Such taxonomic thinking is really important for how we understand the world and our place in it, as each of these terms comes
May 24, 2026 at 11:45 AM