Jules Howard

Jules is a UK-based wildlife expert, zoology correspondent, author, science-writer and broadcaster. He writes for the Guardian, BBC Wildlife Magazine and is a columnist for BBC Focus magazine. His TV appearances include Good Morning Britain, BBC Breakfast, Sunday Brunch, Springwater Unsprung and The One Show. Jules also hosts and performs each year at a number of festivals and live events including Wilderness Festival, Green Man Festival, Blue Dot Festival, Edinburgh International Science Festival and Cheltenham Science Festival.

Jules’s books include Sex on Earth, 2015 (Bloomsbury Sigma) and Death on Earth, 2016 (Bloomsbury Sigma), both explorations of the roles of sex and death in the evolution of life on Earth. The latter was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Biology Book Prize. Other works include Frogs and Toads (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Wildlife Pond Book (Bloomsbury 2019) and Snakes (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Jules’s books for children include: Bones (2018), Prehistoric Creatures of the Order (2019), The Encyclopaedia of Animals (2019) and The Encyclopaedia of Insects (2020).

In critical reviews, Jules’s warm and at times light-hearted delivery has seen him compared to Bill Bryson, Stephen Jay Gould and Jon Ronson. National Geographic have referred to his work as “refreshingly self-aware” and The Boston Globe refer to him as a writer with "...self-deprecating charm and genuine enthusiasm...”. Science have called his writing “Eye-opening, engaging and enjoyably humorous” and Discover magazine sum Jules’s work up as… “Funny and clever… a genuine pleasure.”

Forthcoming publication:

INFINITE LIFE: A Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth - E&T - 9th May 2024

Every animal on the planet owes its existence to one crucial piece of evolutionary engineering: the egg.

It's time to tell a new story of life on Earth.

If you think of an egg, what do you see in your mind's eye? A chicken egg, hard-boiled? A slimy mass of frogspawn? Perhaps you see a human egg cell, prepared on a microscope slide in a laboratory? Or the majestic marble-blue eggs of the blackbird?

Every egg there has ever been, is an emblem of survival. Yet the evolution of the animal egg is the dramatic subplot missing in many accounts of how life on Earth came to be. Quite simply, without this universal biological phenomenon, animals as we know them, including us, could not have evolved and flourished.

In Infinite Life, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.

Whether belonging to birds, insects, mammals or millipedes, animal eggs are objects that have been shaped by their ecology, forged by mass extinctions and honed by natural selection to near-perfection. Finally, the epic story of their role in the tapestry of life can be told.

Praise:

Previous publication: 

WONDERDOG: How the Science of Dogs Changed the Science of Life - Bloomsbury (UK)  12th May 2022  and Pegasus Books (US) 1st November 2022 

What do dogs really think of us? What do dogs know and understand of the world? Do their emotions feel like our own? Do they love like we do?

Driven by his own love of dogs, Charles Darwin was nagged by questions like these. To root out answers, his contemporaries toyed with dog sign language, and they made special puzzle boxes and elaborate sniff tests using old socks to spill out clues. Later, the same perennial questions about the minds of dogs drove Pavlov and Pasteur to unspeakable cruelty in their search for truth. These big names in science influenced leagues of psychologists and animal behaviourists, each building upon the ideas and received wisdom of previous generations but failing to see what was staring them in the face - that the very methods humans used to study dogs' minds were influencing the insights reflected back.

To discover the impressive cognitive feats that dogs are capable of, a new approach was needed. Treated with love and compassion, dogs would open up their unique perspective on the world, and a new breed of scientists would be provided answers to life's biggest questions.

Wonderdog is the story of those dogs - a historical account of how we came to know what dogs are capable of. It's a celebration of the dogs with answers in mind, just waiting for the right questions from humans in their care. And it's a love-letter to science, through the good times and the bad.

Praise:

'Howard's portrayals of the villains and heroes in the research world of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries makes for fascinating reading' - The Times Literary Supplement