Travels on the Edge: A Naturalist's Notes from the Back of Beyond

Adventure tales told, with humanity and warmth, about some of the world’s most remote and fascinating places and their inhabitants

For almost fifty years, Robert McCracken Peck has traveled the world as the official photographer, historian, and chronicler of scientific expeditions from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, America’s oldest natural history institution, now part of Drexel University. He has discovered three new frogs in the Andes, collected several new species of fish on the Orinoco River, and helped study little-known insects in rarely visited parts of Africa and the Caribbean. He has made seven extensive expeditions to Mongolia to study its wildlife and document the fast-changing lives of its nomadic herdsmen. He has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, traveled with camel caravans across the Gobi Desert, faced down headhunters in Ecuador, and been put under house arrest in China.

Travels on the Edge is a collection of stand-alone, but related, essays recounting his remarkable experiences. Lavishly illustrated, the book not only carries readers to some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world but also celebrates the challenges and joys of scientific research. Its author brings a rich human perspective to regions few people have had a chance to explore and brings the people and wildlife he found there to life through his writing and photos.