Copyright © 1997 Dr. Paul H. LeBlond
Photo courtesy of BCSSC
Oceanographer at Ocean Sciences at the University of British Columbia and coauthor with Edward Bousfield of Cadborosaurus.
Dr. Paul H. LeBlond
Chairman
British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (BCSCC)
c/o Suite 89
6141 Willingdon Avenue
Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada V5H 2T9
LeBlond@ocgy.ubc.ca
British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology
Club
Exotic Zoology
Copyright © 1959 The Viking Press
Nearly twenty years ago a young scientist and scholar, German-born and educated, wrote his first book in the field of popular science. It was an adventure story about his own first love, paleontology. Called The Lungfish and the Unicorn, it reached a relatively small but immensely delighted coterie of readers. For Willy Ley's quality of wonder, curiosity, and humor was evident from the beginning, and bygone events when the world was young seem as immediate in his books as if they happened only yesterday - which, of course, in the cosmic timetable, they did. One of Willy Ley's readers summed up by commenting that he wouldn't be at all surprised to look out his window and find a dinosaur nibbling at his flowerbed.
In 1948 The Lungfish and the Unicorn shared top billing with the dodo in a revised and enlarged volume. Later, Dragons in Amber, having to do with survivors from antiquity, animals and plants with wanderlust, and vanished flora and fauna, appeared; then Salamanders and Other Wonders, about other bizarre animals and plants.
Meanwhile, Willy Ley several times deserted or planet and went traveling off into space, as if our world wasn't big enough for his talents. In this avant-garde role in 1944 he pioneered with a book called, simply, Rockets, which was expanded in 1947 to Rockets and Space Travel, in 1951 to Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, and again revised in 1957 (with other ventures into space sandwiched in between).
Many readers met him initially as he zoomed beyond the stratosphere. Some will perhaps encounter him for the first time as a natural historian in Exotic Zoology, while others will renew his acquaintance from the previous "Romantic Naturalist" books, which form the basis of this one.
Ley, Willy, Exotic Zoology, (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1995), Jacket Cover.
