The Wonders of Life

Here we have an endless stream of exotica—exotic living things growing from the ground and exotic critters of all shapes and sizes, crawling, bounding, and flying around. As LIFE's editors put it in their, “This is a wild book. In its pages we have animals as big as trucks and plants as big as small towns. We have flowers that dance for our pleasure and flowers that shyly hide underground, flowers that can kill animals and flowers that can heal animals. We have a teeny tiny bird that is directly descended from T. rex and a truly enormous bird that can't fly but can run 45 miles an hour. We have a lizard king that could rip you apart and a lizard princeling that walks on water. This is a wild, wild book.” It is indeed. It is a book that is focused on life at the far fringes—the biggest, toughest, gentlest, rarest and weirdest species. It ultimately creates an astonishing image of the world around us, a world more diverse and sometimes strange than even the most imaginative reader might have expected. Accompanying the remarkable photography, which is always LIFE's hallmark, are descriptions of each subject that will fairly boggle the mind. Did you know that a carnivorous plant's trapping mechanism often doubles as its stomach, or that an elephant seal can hold its breath for up to two hours when diving in the sea? There are as many amazing facts in these pages as there are sensational pictures. And as with earlier volumes in LIFE's Classic Collection series, Wonders of Life comes with a bonus five photographic prints from the famed LIFE archive that can be extracted, framed and hung on your wall. When the print is removed, the exact picture is still there on the page beneath, so your deluxe coffee-table book remains intact. It is, as the editors write, “an elegant trick worthy of the dancing flower, and one that our readers have come to expect—and greatly enjoy.” Travel along then, around the globe and to the depths of the oceans, as LIFE celebrates the wonders of life—each of them wondrous almost beyond belief.