Entomologist Piotr Naskrecki takes readers not just around the world--from the dense forests of New Guinea and Ghana's remote Atewa Plateau to a beach in New Jersey--but through time as well. The natural world still contains traces of distant epochs past, in the form of organisms and habitats that remain comparatively untouched by evolution. Naskrecki describes his pursuit of these incredible "relics" with an enthusiasm that matches his considerable expertise, and his photographs are so astonishingly vivid the subjects threaten to crawl off the page. The best moment of Relics occurs, somewhat surprisingly, on the Jersey shore, as Naskrecki witnesses the 440-millionth annual mass-spawning of horseshoe crabs. "As strange and distant as [they] may seem," he writes as the crabs drag themselves from the sea, "these majestic organisms remind me that we share the same evolutionary heritage." Revelatory moments like this show how our pre-human history is not as remote as it may seem. --Hannah Calkins, blogger at Unpunished Vice