About the Author

Ralph Buchsbaum was professor emeritus of biology at the University of Pittsburgh. Mildred Buchsbaum has collaborated on previous editions of Animals Without Backbones. John Pearse, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Vicki Pearse, a research associate in biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, are coeditors with A. C. Giese of the multivolume Reproduction of Marine Invertebrates and have published many papers in invertebrate zoology.

Reviews

"If you had told the ten-year-old me that Animals without Backbones was a classic biology textbook, I would never have picked it up. I struggled to, anyway: the decades-old dog-eared copy that I found at the back of my dad's bookcase had a loose monochrome cover that always wanted to come off in my hands. This was a link to his world as a scientist, and to what he did all day. (Actually, he was a research chemist, but what did I know.) More, the book was a glimpse of a world just as alien as those in the pages of my 2000 AD comic, peopled with warlocks and genetic infantrymen. The pictures looked hand-drawn, and showed features on the outside of the creatures as well as their inner structures. I studied those pages and copied the drawings--the stunning representation of the Hydra especially--into my sketch pad, next to Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd. 2000 AD later published one of those drawings, but it was the fantastic stories of the true, hidden world of invertebrates that really fired my imagination."--David Adam "Nature"