It started with a glass octopus. Fashioned in detail by the father-son glassmaking team of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, the octopus belonged to a menagerie of unusual marine creatures that had been stored in a Corning Museum of Glass storage unit. This book reveals the unusual biology of some of the most ancient animals on the tree of life.
It started with a glass octopus. Dusty, broken, and all but forgotten, it caught Drew Harvell's eye and inspired one of the greatest adventures of her life. From diving for dangerous jellyfish in the Mediterranean to searching for harpoon-backed sea slugs in Southeast Asia, A Sea of Glass recounts the author's quest to document the living invertebrates that inspired history's greatest father-son glassmaking team to spin their likeness into glass more than 160 years ago. The story of these artists, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, whose menagerie of unusual marine creatures was packed away for decades in a Cornell University storage unit, provides a time capsule of life in earlier oceans untouched by climate change and human impacts.
