Jules Howard
Writer
Books
Books
Jules is a UK-based wildlife expert, zoology correspondent, author, science-writer and broadcaster. He writes for the Guardian, BBC Wildlife Magazine and is a columnist for BBC Focus magazine. His TV appearances include Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast, Sunday Brunch, Springwater Unsprung and The One Show. Jules also hosts and performs each year at a number of festivals and live events including Wilderness Festival, Green Man Festival, Blue Dot Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival and Cheltenham Science Festival.
Jules’s books include Sex on Earth, 2015 (Bloomsbury Sigma) and Death on Earth, 2016 (Bloomsbury Sigma), both explorations of the roles of sex and death in the evolution of life on Earth. The latter was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Prize. Other works include Frogs and Toads (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Wildlife Pond Book (Bloomsbury 2019) and Snakes (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Jules’s books for children include: Bones (2018), Prehistoric Creatures of the Order (2019), The Encyclopaedia of Animals (2019) and The Encyclopaedia of Insects (2020).
In critical reviews, Jules’s warm and at times light-hearted delivery has seen him compared to Bill Bryson, Stephen Jay Gould and Jon Ronson. National Geographic have referred to his work as “refreshingly self-aware” and The Boston Globe refer to him as a writer with "...self-deprecating charm and genuine enthusiasm...”. Science have called his writing “Eye-opening, engaging and enjoyably humorous” and Discover magazine sum Jules’s work up as… “Funny and clever… a genuine pleasure.”
Current publication:
INFINITE LIFE: A Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth - E&T - 9th May 2024
Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary engineering: the egg.
It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.
If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chicken egg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blue eggs of the blackbird?
Every egg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.
In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.
Whether belonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their role in the tapestry of life can be told.
Praise:
'In this witty, wise, and accessible book, Jules Howard celebrates the humble egg. Breezy and conversational, Howard goes on a journey spanning billions of years, from the first bacteria to us. This is as fun and engaging as science writing gets, and by the end of the book, it’s astounding how much you’ve learned about the history of life'. - Steve Brusatte, professor and paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh and Sunday Times/New York Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
'Mind-bending in the best possible ways. Jules’ prose is a joy to read. He deftly masters the art and science of transporting readers to specific, vivid moments in the past, like a time travelling natural history documentary, and weaving them together with digestible explanations of big topics. INFINITE LIFE has levelled up my knowledge and appreciation of evolution and given me a whole new outlook on the humble egg. Boiled eggs for breakfast will never be the same again.' - Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss
‘Infinite Life is thoroughly researched and packed with astonishing facts … Howard brings the minutiae of his subject to life with detailed, almost tactile descriptions.’ - The Times
'Carving out a niche in the increasingly crowded milieu of popular-science writing can be difficult, but Infinite Life stands out. It’s a satisfyingly nerdy examination of eggs, rooted in an unashamed affection for this unlikely spectacle of nature.' - Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Nature
‘So much passion and poetic prose' - Inside Science, BBC Radio 4
‘In a book that brilliantly evokes past eras, Howard provides a new perspective on the history of life on Earth.’ - The Mail on Sunday
‘Finally, the egg gets the recognition it deserves in this wonderfully evocative telling of its journey through time and place’ - Gaia Vince, author of Nomad Century and Transcendence
‘One of my favourite science writers’ - Lucy Cooke, author of Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal
‘Focusing on the oology in zoology, Infinite Life retells the history of life, this time from the perspective of the almighty egg.’ - The Inquisitive Biologist
‘High-quality natural history.’ Kirkus Reviews
‘The egg is a beautiful thing, far from simple and far from static. If you’ve never given it much thought before, this book will change that.’ Geographical
'Jules really questions some of the classic narratives that we have in evolutionary history, like this idea that moving away from water was this triumphant moment for life on land … no, they just were really looking for soft soil to put their egg in to stay moist! It’s a book that really loves its subject and I like the way it combines different ways of storytelling along with some of the latest scientific discoveries.' Science Friday
'His excitement is infectious and indicative of his approach to the entire book. This is an author who has found joy in his research, joy in his writing, and joy in sharing what he learned.' Booklist
'Remarkable in both its scope and focus, Infinite Life is a scintillating, wild, and scientifically robust romp through time and space. Howard has a gift for exploring scientifically rigorous explanations through rich, exciting stories.' Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist and author of Natural Selections
'A loving ode to eggs, Infinite Life is a fascinating journey through the nested history of how living things bring about ever more life. Jules Howard skillfully balances new scientific research with visions of the past as he peels back each layer of evolutionary history.' Riley Black, author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and When the Earth Was Green
'Infinite Life has the potential to change your perspective on the history of our planet. It offers a journey that will intrigue and open your mind to the wonders of all life on Earth.' Science
'Even the most hard-boiled reader, accustomed to overlooking eggs in favor of the free-living creatures that emerge from them, will likely be softened. And delighted.' Wall Street Journal
Previous publication:
WONDERDOG: How the Science of Dogs Changed the Science of Life - Bloomsbury (UK) 12th May 2022 and Pegasus Books (US) 1st November 2022
What do dogs really think of us? What do dogs know and understand of the world? Do their emotions feel like our own? Do they love like we do?
Driven by his own love of dogs, Charles Darwin was nagged by questions like these. To root out answers, his contemporaries toyed with dog sign language, and they made special puzzle boxes and elaborate sniff tests using old socks to spill out clues. Later, the same perennial questions about the minds of dogs drove Pavlov and Pasteur to unspeakable cruelty in their search for truth. These big names in science influenced leagues of psychologists and animal behaviourists, each building upon the ideas and received wisdom of previous generations but failing to see what was staring them in the face - that the very methods humans used to study dogs' minds were influencing the insights reflected back.
To discover the impressive cognitive feats that dogs are capable of, a new approach was needed. Treated with love and compassion, dogs would open up their unique perspective on the world, and a new breed of scientists would be provided answers to life's biggest questions.
Wonderdog is the story of those dogs - a historical account of how we came to know what dogs are capable of. It's a celebration of the dogs with answers in mind, just waiting for the right questions from humans in their care. And it's a love-letter to science, through the good times and the bad.
Praise:
'Howard's portrayals of the villains and heroes in the research world of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries makes for fascinating reading' - The Times Literary Supplement
'From Darwin and Pavlov to the latest research in canine science, Wonderdog reflects first-rate scholarship yet reads like a detective novel. This book puts Jules Howard in the top ranks of contemporary science writers'. - Hal Herzog, author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
