AskNature

Beastly Bionics:: Rad Robots, Brilliant Biomimicry, and Incredible Inventions Inspired by Nature presents the stories behind more than 40 biomimetic products, providing information about the engineering challenges that led to their development and what engineers and scientists learned from animals. It’s richly illustrated with photographs and illustrations.

Each biomimetic invention covers two pages and the information is broken down into sections: the amazing animal, the challenge the engineers needed to solve, how the technology was created along with design constraints, useful additions to the technology that the original animal doesn’t have, and another fascinating fact about the animal. There are also scattered pages called Taking a Closer Look, Tail of Discovery, and One Creature, Many Creations.

This book is useful during various stages of learning about biomimicry. Educators can use these examples of learning from nature to explain what biomimicry is and help students understand the biomimetic design process. After reading about a product, the students could try to identify the functions and state the biological and design strategies. They also can use the information about the challenge or animal to inspire other biomimetic projects.