Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body; How the Snake Lost Its Legs: Curious Tales from the Frontier of Evo-Devo; Deep Homology? Uncanny Similarities of Humans and Flies Uncovered by Evo-Devo and Animal Anomalies: What Abnormal Anatomies Reveal about Normal Development Available to Purchase

I first ran into Lewis I. Held, Jr., associate professor of developmental genetics at Texas Tech, when Quirks of Human Anatomy: An Evo-Devo Look at the Human Body appeared during my last few years of classroom teaching. For a couple of decades, I had taken my tenth graders through a seven-week unit on human development, just before we studied the Darwinian revolution, followed by genetics to close out the year. We tracked the first seven weeks of development in real time from fertilization on the first day of the term – talking about all aspects of reproductive anatomy, egg development, and meiosis – then each day marking the new anatomy, location, and size of the embryo from its first mitosis through the differentiation of cell types and tissues and the development of the major body systems. This was primarily old-fashioned descriptive embryology, but I was always on the lookout for...