Jules Howard encourages readers to Choose Your Own Evolution
About Author
Jules Howard shares his fascination with evolution through his new choose-your-own-adventure - style book for children, Choose Your Own Evolution.
Jules is a zoology correspondent, author, science-writer and broadcaster. He writes for the Guardian, BBC Wildlife Magazine and Science Focus magazine and appears regularly on TV and radio, including Newsround and BBC Radio 5 Live. Jules's popular non-fiction books for children include The Who, What, Why of Zoology, Respect the Insect and the bestselling Encyclopedia of Animals.
Interview
June 2025
Jules Howard invites readers to Choose Your Own Evolution (Nosy Crow)
In Choose Your Own Evolution, a 'pick-your-own-adventure'-style non-fiction book, readers are invited to follow the evolutionary path of different creatures; will you survive - or will you take the wrong evolutionary path, and become extinct! Adding this gaming element to the book brings a fun twist to learning about evolution - together with the unexpected facts readers learn along the way! We find out more from broadcaster and author Jules Howard.
Review: "Using a 'pick-your-own-path' format, Choose Your Own Evolution offers a really unique and engaging exploration of life on Earth." - Sue, ReadingZone Read an extract from Choose Your Own Evolution.
Q&A with Jules Howard, exploring evolutionary pathways in Choose Your Own Evolution
"Evolution quietly explains the quirks of our bodies and brains that most of us fail to consider in our day-to-day lives.
For instance, it's a weird thing to say, but why do you have two nostrils, a beating heart, jelly-like eyes?"
1. Hello and thank you for joining us on ReadingZone! Can you tell us how you started writing non-fiction for children, and what kinds of subjects you cover? Do you hope your books will help spark a love of your own speciality, zoology, in young readers?
My beginning on this path is slightly fateful. Once, decades ago, I got a phone-call from BBC Wildlife Magazine asking me to write an answer to a reader's question about frogs (a research passion at the time) and that's where it all started, really. I got the writing bug. After this, as well as research, I worked closely with schools and teachers for about ten years, helping teach evolution and fossils with a travelling fossil collection.
These two pastimes - writing and school visits - ended up melding together, much to my pleasure. For me, books are the perfect way to make a truly lasting impression on young minds about nature, life, the universe and everything. Quite simply, books are portable inspiration machines. But your readers and subscribers know this, I'm sure.
2. Can you tell us what your new book, Choose Your Own Evolution, is about?
The book is a classic choose-your-own adventure, where readers begin their existence as an extraordinarily simple primitive animal - the shared ancestor of molluscs, insects and bony animals - and 'choose' their evolutionary pathway through the animal family tree, according to the threats they face in their world. Readers either end up extinct, by becoming, for instance, a Tyrannosaurus rex, or they 'evolve' down a path to become a modern day, living organism, like a shark, a chimpanzee or (my favourite) a whale louse.
3. What gave you this (rather brilliant!) idea of a 'you choose' exploration of evolution? How did you decide to approach it?
Believe it or not, it's been in my head for years. I used to do a simple version of the 'Choose-Your-Own' set-up when working with primary schools as far back as 2010, which always went down well. I even pitched it to a few publishers. It was Nosy Crow, way back in 2020, who independently fell in love with the playful creativity of the concept and, together, we went for it!
4. What do you hope young readers will enjoy the most in this approach to evolution? What will they learn about evolution as they make their options for 'go extinct or survive'?
That's actually a great question because, in a non-shouty, thoughtful way, the book has a lot to say. One message is that humans are not the pinnacle of evolution; that each animal, be it a gliding lizard or a chimpanzee, has had equal time adapting and (unconsciously) mastering its own place in its ecosystem.
Another message is that evolution quietly explains the quirks of our bodies and brains that most of us fail to consider in our day-to-day lives. For instance, it's a weird thing to say, but why do you have two nostrils, a beating heart, jelly-like eyes? The answer is simply that these are the arrangements we inherited from our fish ancestors, four hundred or so million years ago. We rarely consider stuff like this.
Even after studying the subject for many years, I'm still blown away by the fact that wobbly teeth are not a human thing. It's a mammal thing we've inherited from a Mesozoic ancestor that scuffled around at the feet of dinosaurs. What could possibly be cooler than that?
5. Evolution is hugely complex - how did you go about researching it for Choose Your Own Evolution?
I don't think this book could exist if it weren't for the non-fiction books I write for adults on zoology and evolution. These books for adults cover the role of the egg in the story of evolution, books on the evolution of mammal brains (through the lens of dogs) and the impact that sex has had on the story of life.
Writing a non-fiction book for adults is like making a giant, very complicated house, with strong foundations (made from boring but important things like well-evidenced research). When I write for children, often I am taking these young readers through the 'house' I wrote for adults, pointing out the amazing things on the way, together, in a more fun and liberating 'come and look at this!' kind of way.
... And what kinds of information will readers learn about each of the creatures whose evolutionary trail they follow in the book?
Oh, a lot! Their history, where they came from, the threats they faced which natural selection acted upon to inform their shape and style. Their behaviours. Their life-challenges: finding food, mates, places to lay their eggs, predators to avoid. Life is so rich, we tried to take as much as possible to make it work…
6. How did you choose the options for the creatures you include and their evolutionary pathways - the 'what happens next' in the book - and how do you keep readers engaged and turning the pages?
Nosy Crow gave me total freedom to come up with the different paths, which involved a giant decision-tree Excel spreadsheet printed on paper scattered across my kitchen table. The challenge was making sure that the book wasn't full of the 'classic' bony animals that feature in lots of animal books - things like lions, birds-of-paradise and pandas.
For this book to reflect real-life evolution meant that insects, crustaceans and spiders needed to be really well represented. Same for molluscs - snails, octopus, squid and the like. This freed me up to choose animals that most children don't read about in other books: things like house spiders, rove beetles and eyelash mites. All the weird stuff!
7. There are some startling facts in the book, for example that chickens and penguins are descended from dinosaurs. What are your favourite evolutionary facts?
So many. I love that something like 35% of people still have the muscles in their lips to waggle whiskers that we have lost long ago in our evolutionary history. I love that marsupials have antibiotic pouches. That chimpanzee languages have something a bit like grammatical rules. That there are fungi that look like termite eggs to trick termites into caring for them. Too many facts, too little time…
8. It's so helpful to have the evolutionary 'map' at the back of the book. Why did you want readers to have this, and is there one evolutionary thread that stands out for you?
Thanks for saying that. That 'Tree of Life' page is kind of like the book's index - but in a visible form that allows readers to see the evolutionary 'splits' of the animals that they loved reading about in the main body of the book. You can see, for instance, that dogs and cats are really closely related to one another or that octopus and sharks are very distantly related, which isn't always clear when working a path through the stories in the book.
Which story do I have a soft spot for? There's no doubt that the human story is amazing. A fishy graduate of the ocean, long ago, that out-survives the (non-bird) dinosaurs, makes it to the forests and then 'claims' the grasslands as an upright ape… and then ends up constructing farms and towns and cities and schools. Impressive.
But choosing humans feels too obvious. I love the dogs spread that Gordy drew up so beautifully - so much evolutionary ingenuity and wonderful variety in all these dog breeds, partly through selective breeding by us, but also through the dog's natural inclination to shape itself to the human ecosystem.
9. What did you enjoy about Gordy Wright's illustrations and how do they help the readers' experience? How did you find out what some of these ancient creatures would have looked like?
I'm so glad you asked this. Gordy is so brilliant at this but it must have felt like a real challenge at the concept-stage: too comic and the book loses its scientific edge; too cartoon-like and it might end up looking like a collection of 'just-so' stories; too serious and we risk making this topic too textbook-like, somehow.
Gordy hit the sweet-spot between these issues in the most perfect way. His illustrations are colourful, full of life and, honestly, they make my heart swell when I look at them. And they took a lot of scientific research to get right - remember, many of these animals are sometimes known only from a spattering of fossilised bones dug up by scientists. Gordy brought them to life really beautifully.
10. Are there special places in nature or that you like to visit that help drive your own continued interest in the creatures that share the planet with us humans?
For me, it has to be anywhere there are fossils. I live in the East Midlands, which was once, a long time ago, a scraggy Jurassic seabed heaving with prehistoric life. I like to spend my days fossil-hunting, looking for octopus-like ammonites, fossil worm droppings, shark teeth and fossil bones (once or twice a year) from marine reptiles, including turtles.
Fossils are important to me: they underline how much there is still out there to discover about our world but also, it's an incredible feeling to hold something so old, that hasn't been seen by anyone else. One single fossil discovery makes me feel like a kid again. It's a connecting experience, in all sorts of ways.
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