“A brilliant contribution to the animal turn in history, this thought-provoking and page-turning book opens up our understanding of how natural science was done in the eighteenth century and how it is done now.”—Environmental History

“Robles is adept at identifying and explicating moments in natural history when a creature’s profound otherness, from the perspective of human scientists, forced those scientists to wonder about themselves. . . . Encourage[s] us to consider how relationships of cooperation and perhaps even solidarity might be forged between human beings and animals.”—Daniel Kraft, Hedgehog Review

“Curious Species . . . takes laudable intellectual risks, including the use of fieldwork and the adoption of the situated first-person perspective. . . . Provides a compelling new way of understanding how Enlightenment natural history contributed both to the mass extinction crisis and to the life sciences that enable us to begin to reckon with its implications.”—Eighteenth Century Studies

“Captivating.”—Yale Alumni Magazine

Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by the Indiana University Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Received Honorable Mention for the Lois P. Rudnick Book Award from the New England American Studies Association

Finalist for the Huntington Library’s 2025 Shapiro Book Prize

Runner-up for the George Perkins Marsh Prize, sponsored by the American Society for Environmental History
 

“Full of insight and wit, Curious Species is a genre-expanding account of knowledge and politics. Deeply researched and a joy to read, this book illuminates the ways animals from rattlesnakes to raccoons co-made our understandings of them.”—Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

“A provocative, sparklingly written hybrid work combining original historical scholarship with lively first-person narrative and natural historical observation.”—Anya Zilberstein, author of A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America

“Early modern cabinets of curiosity generated sensations of wonder. So does Curious Species, with its awe-inspiring tales from the past and breathless accounts of Whitney Barlow Robles’s fearless pursuit of rare coral, raccoons, and rattlesnakes.”—Peter C. Mancall, author of Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic

“Curious Species is exceptional: Whitney Robles has crafted a highly original, convincing, nuanced, and thought provoking study of how curiosity and animal nature overlap to shape, inspire, and circumscribe knowledge.”—Cameron B. Strang, author of Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850

“A captivating account of the many ways in which humans and other animals made each other ‘curious,’ in the eighteenth century and today. Whitney Barlow Robles expertly leads us in pursuit of Enlightenment naturalists as they observe, describe, depict, collect, and preserve corals, rattlesnakes, fish, and raccoons across the world, and reflects on what it means to follow in their footsteps in the present.”—Daniela Bleichmar, author of Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin