"A well-researched piece of popular science... Ryan successfully shows that a deeper knowledge of metamorphosis could have far-reaching consequences."

– The Big Issue

“A brilliant book…a superb story, some excellent scientific insights, and a fascinating theory. Recommended.” Brian Clegg

– PopularScience.co.uk

“The ideas that Frank Ryan describes – fusion between quite different creatures – at first seem ludicrous, but what great ideas in science do not? The more you think about them the more you feel, 'Yes, it must be so’. Metamorphosis has joined my shortlist of biological must-reads.”

– Colin Tudge - author of The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor and The Secret Life of Trees

“Ryan makes the beauty of metamorphosis palpable, and lays down the work of those variant personalities – by turns taciturn and gregarious, methodical and intuitive – who’ve attempted to wrest from nature the secrets of this transformation. He presents both an ethnography and a history, not only of science as it is believed and accepted to have happened after the fact, but also of science in medias res – science right now, before our eyes, forming.”

– Lynn Margulis - University Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts

“Ryan makes the beauty of metamorphosis palpable, and lays down the work of those variant personalities – by turns taciturn and gregarious, methodical and intuitive – who’ve attempted to wrest from nature the secrets of this transformation…. He presents both an ethnography and a history, not only of science as it is believed and accepted to have happened after the fact, but also of science in medias res – science right now, before our eyes, forming.”

– Lynn Margulis - University Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts