Amazing Photos Reveal How the Natural World Copies Itself

Even the hard categorizations and taxonomies of a natural history museum don’t hide the beauty of the world. There are the vast troves of minerals, shiny and colorful. The weirdly attractive corkboards full of geometrically-pinned beetles and dragonflies. The pickled remains of snakes, coiled and squished into glass jars for your perusal. But rarely do you get to see those specimens side by side: Each animal, vegetable, and mineral has its own place (sometimes even a whole wing!).

In the beautiful images collected in the new book Biophilia (which means “love of life”), photographer and naturalist Christopher Marley carefully presents those specimens in environments they’d never see in the real world, or even a museum. In a section called Unity, he pairs each image of a snake, or bird, or spider with its perfect visual counterpoint—regardless of its species or its point of origin.

Marley chooses his juxtapositions carefully to emphasize the full spectrum of color displayed—and replicated—in the natural world. His chosen flora and fauna bring out each others’ best hues: A collection of butterflies in gold amplifies a textural close-up of a veiled chameleon from Madagascar. The vivid green and purple wings of an Ecuadorian grasshopper mimic a trio of Gouldian finches, each in different vibrant colors. A mosaic of tropical fish from around the world collectively displays the same spectrum as a single pied red-rumped parrot.

Biophilia, Harry N. Abrams, 2015.Biophilia, Harry N. Abrams, 2015. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

But most of Marley’s comparisons are subtler than color-changing chameleons and neon plumage. You’d probably never think to call a horseshoe crab beautiful, but positioned next to the warm tans and browns of the Egyptian cape dove, a carefully-placed configuration of four (deceased) arthropods comes to life. The symmetry of the horseshoe crabs’ spiky, elongated tails look all the more remarkable next to the dove’s tiny, pointed beak. And the feather-like spines that protrude from their underbellies—what are those things for, anyway?—look more delicate than menacing next to the bird’s plumage.

Flipping through these images, you begin to get the feeling that nature is drawing inspiration from itself, even copying itself outright. And in a sense, it is. The gently curving tendrils that extend from the whip scorpion’s long, frontal legs—used not to walk, but purely to feel their way around—look like the aquatic serpent star’s curling arms for a reason. They’re responding to the same evolutionary pressures, the same millennia of environmental nudging.

In the world humans share with these urchins, aviators, deep-sea divers and slow parambulators, recurring geometries and colors are a sign of our essential oneness. What’s not to love?

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