'Smart, lively, and hugely informative... the ideal guide to the bones around us and in us' Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armor, and an even greater array of appendages since the time of its origin. In dinosaur fossils, skeletons are biological time capsules that tell us of lives we ll never see in the flesh. Inherited from a common fishy ancestor, it is the stuff that binds all of us vertebrates together into one great family. Swim, slither, stomp, fly, dig, run - all are expressions of what bones make possible. But that s hardly all. In The Secret Life of Bone, Brian Switek frames the history of our species through the importance of bone from instruments and jewellery, to objects of worship and conquest from the origins of religion through the genesis of science and up through this very day. While bone itself can reveal our individual stories, the truth very much depends on who s telling it. Our skeletons are as embedded in our culture as they are in our bodies. Switek, an enthusiastic osteological raconteur, cuts through biology, history, and culture to understand the meaning of what s inside us and what our bones tell us about who we are, where we came from and the legacies we leave behind.***PRAISE FOR THE SECRET LIFE OF BONES*** 'A provocative and entertaining magical mineral tour through the life and afterlife of bone' The Wall Street Journal 'Switek writes with remarkable grace about the natural world... Every chapter has some surprise, told in elegant tales, that you will repeat to your friends' Carl Zimmer, author of She Has Her Mother's Laugh 'A lyrical love letter to the 206 or so bones in the human skeleton and the colourful figures who have studied them over the centuries' Jennifer Ouellette, author of The Calculus Diaries