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Picture yourself standing in a dry riverbed two thousand years ago, looking down at something that should not exist. A skull the size of a person has washed out of the rock. Its jaws could close around a horse. Its teeth are longer than your hand. You have never seen a museum, never heard of a Jurassic Period, and you hold no framework that says whole kinds of animal can live and vanish long before people exist. So what do you decide you are looking at? A giant? A monster? Or

After dark, the deep Sahara of southwestern Libya is one of the emptiest places on earth. The heat of the day drains away quickly, the temperature can fall towards freezing, and the dunes run for hundreds of kilometres with almost no one to see them. Somewhere out in that dark, a small pale cat no larger than a house pet moves across the sand on furred feet, leaving barely a track, its oversized ears turned to the faint sound of a gerbil shifting in its burrow underground. Fo

Far out on a grey sea, before you ever glimpse the animal itself, you see its breath. A tall white column rises from the water and hangs in the cold air, catches the light, plus drifts away on the wind. To most people it is simply a sign that a whale is there. But to a trained eye, that plume is already whispering something, and the interesting question is how much it is really saying, and how much it is holding back. A whale's blow is not just water spray. It is shaped by th