Dr. Jan Taylor is a zoologist with many interests ranging from geology and the origin of life to the evolution of mankind. He was brought up in England in a family preoccupied by events in the natural world – where during the war the arrival of the first cuckoo almost took precedence over the air-raid warnings, dog fights and buzz bombs.

He studied zoology and entomology at Imperial College and went on to work for the Nature Conservancy surveying an occurrence of unusual fox mortality in the winter of 1959-60, which was found to be due to pesticides (before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) and then took over the management of the Breckland nature reserves in East Anglia. The next appointment was with the Ministry of Agriculture to do research on the behaviour and control of the grey squirrel.

In 1969 the family moved to Australia to escape the English climate and he became a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, concentrating on ecology, entomology and evolution. A deep knowledge on the Australian environment was acquired over the next eight years.

After leaving the University he devoted much time to writing and wildlife photography, and travelled extensively, gaining experience in many of the world’s ecosystems. In two of the six books published – Evolution in the Outback and Australia’s Southwest and Our Future – ideas were developed about change with time and the future of mankind. The current book: Human Intelligence – the Developing Cuckoo is based on experiences in many parts of the world and is the final synthesis to complete the trilogy. (Evolution in the Outback won the Victorian C. J. Dennis award in 1988 for natural history writing.)