Enlightening but gory body of work

I’VE got you under my skin — a motley collection of animals could sing that catchy refrain in uncomfortable harmony, thanks to gutsy scientists who’ve brought fresh light to dark, dangerous and gory spots.

The scientists have done it on TV, via a mobile phone app, and now in a book format that will appeal to every curious child, adult and natural scientist. They are the science world’s equivalent of TV’s gung-ho Jackass gang, all togged out in orange overalls like the cast of Misfits, and they’ve had the knives out for creatures far bigger than themselves in places from South Africa to west Cork, and from Australia to Zambia, filming from A to Z.

Television can satisfy, and also prompt, the strangest curiosities, blood lusts and macabre machinations, through some ground-breaking series, from the 1990s’ The Human Body through to the Victorian freak shows and plastination exhibitions of anatomist Dr Gunther Von Hagens. Advances in camera technology can bring images back from the deepest regions, around the globe, and in living cells. But, sometimes, a large, sharp knife and a saw can be just as good — and viewers of Channel 4’s Inside Nature’s Giants will have seen blades and weaponry wielded with gut-spilling aplomb.

About the only sense left unassailed for viewers, thankfully, is smell.

So, fair praise to the C4 Inside Nature’s Giants series producer, David Dugan, for not putting ‘scratch and sniff’ pages in the just-published book of highlights from the first three series of the BAFTA-award winning series: it’s about the only thing they seem to have held back on. You can rewatch episodes via its website and on National Geographic. The series’ downloadable app goes inside the range of animals featuring autopsies, dissections, fact files, and videos, and the book, well, it’s eminently put-downable, if you’re squeamish. But, you won’t be long getting curious to pick it up again and continue the inside-out learning curve of animal anatomy and evolution.

Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke said we’ve sought to learn more about the moon and outer space than we know about the deep sea, the stomping grounds of creatures only barely understood or glimpsed, from alien-looking giant squid with three hearts pumping blue blood and powering ten limbs, to the squid’s natural predators, sperm whales.

Inside Nature’s Giants has doubled up on whales, with a recent TV special on sperm whales, but the BAFTA-winning first series, which aired in 2009, included the dissection of the 65’, 60-ton fin whale that fetched up dying in Cork’s Courtmacsherry Bay, a fate familiar to regular readers of this Outdoors page as the animal’s travails (and, indeed, entrails) have featured here.

That fin whale’s skeleton has now been put on permanent display in nearby Kilbritain village a few miles inland, and the almost unseemly skirmish between the two villages over the remains was a sort of real-life War of the Buttons, or of the Baleens.

This book devotes 20 pages to this Baleen beauty, getting deep under its skin: so deep, in fact, that one of the show’s knowledgeable crew, professor of anatomy, Joy Reidenberg, was able to climb inside it (secular shades of Jonah in the whale’s belly) to retrieve the larynx, to show, as she says, how this leviathan has the loudest, lowest, longest and largest voice — the sirens of sailors’ lore.

Moving from the sea’s second-largest species to land’s largest animals, the intrepid gut-spilling crew also got to climb into a 40-year-old Asian zoo elephant that was euthanised after suffering from crippling arthritis. The immensity of these so-strange creatures is explored, as are its anatomical and engineering quirks, from the uses of a trunk, to how they cool themselves (the ears) and facts you won’t forget, like the way elephants are possibly unique as quadrupeds in that each limb is used for both braking and accelerating, a sort of four-wheel drive of the animal world.

The just-published Harper Collins book (£20, app from the App Store, or check out www.channel4.com) includes interjections from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and eye-poppingly delves under the skins of a shark, turtle, snake, hippo (closely related to whales), giraffe (now, there’s a weird one,) kangaroo, polar bear, crocodile (did you know that despite their immense bite, they’re useless at chewing?) the unfathomable rain forest flightless birds, the cassowary, and larger ‘big cat’ lions and tigers — which, despite their exterior differences, are very similar once you take their skin off, we’re informed.

The cats quite probably say the same about us.