LIFE Wonders of Life: A Fantastic Voyage Through Nature

Here we have an endless stream of exotica-exotic living things growing from the ground and exotic critters of all shapes and sizes, crawling, bounding and flying around. As LIFE's editors put it in their introduction: "This is a wild book. In its pages we have animals as big as trucks and plants as big as small towns. We have flowers that dance for our pleasure and flowers that shyly hide underground, flowers that can kill animals and flowers that can heal animals. We have a teeny tiny bird that is directly descended from T Rex and a truly enormous bird that can't fly but can run 45 miles an hour. We have a lizard king that could rip you apart and a lizard princeling that walks on water. This is a wild, wild book." It is indeed. It is a book that is focused on life at the far fringes-the biggest, toughest, gentlest, rarest and weirdest species.