Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story Illustrated edition

Sometimes a snail isn't just a snail, but a mirror, a mystery, and something truly magnificent.Long ago, before half the stars that speckle the sky were born and the mountains rose up reaching for them, a giant ocean covered the Earth. One day, in that giant ocean, something strange happened: a change so mysterious and magnificent that it was given a special name: mutation. From this mutation, life was born from non-life--the first living creatures, tinier than a grain of sand, tinier than the tip of the eyelash of a mouse, came into being. Time tended to them kindly. Soon--which in cosmic time means millions and millions of years--they crawled out of the ocean and onto the land. Not knowing whether they would find a home there, some of these brave early explorers carried their homes on their backs. And so snails took to the Earth. And then, one autumn afternoon a cosmic blink ago, a human--a retired scientist from the London's Natural History Museum--stopped mid-stride on his walk when he noticed a most unusual garden snail in a pile of compost. And so Jeremy and his story become a human story as well.
Based on a real scientific event and inspired by a beloved real human in the author’s life, this is a story about science and the poetry of existence; about time and chance, genetics and gender, love and death, evolution and infinity — concepts often too abstract for the human mind to fathom, often more accessible to the young imagination; concepts made fathomable in the concrete, finite life of one tiny, unusual creature dwelling in a pile of compost amid an English garden. Emerging from this singular life is a lyrical universal invitation not to mistake difference for defect and to welcome, across the accordion scales of time and space, diversity as the wellspring of the universe’s beauty and resilience.
Celebrating science and the poetry of existence, a true story about time and chance, genetics and gender, love and death.