1. What is an animal? -- 2. Before there were animals -- 3. How to make a fossil -- 4. The Cambrian explosion -- 5. How to make a species -- 6. Jellyfish and their kin -- 7. How to make a tree -- 8. The enigmatic urbilaterian -- 9. Animal symmetry and heads -- 10. A plethora of worms -- 11. Trends in animal complexity -- 12. Where the octopus is king -- 13. How to make an animal -- 14. Exoskeletons galore -- 15. Extinction -- 16. Mouth first, mouth second -- 17. Comparing embryos -- 18. Larvae, mouthparts and moulting -- 19. The animal toolkit -- 20. Vertebrate origins and evolution -- 21. From water to land to water -- 22. Variation and inheritance -- 23. Evolutionary novelties -- 24. Human origins and evolution -- 25. Animal plasticity -- 26. The nature of adaptation -- 27. The direction of evolution -- 28. Animal extremophiles -- 29. Extraterrestrial animals? -- 30. The ghost in the machine.