How we paint and sculpt animals reveals quite a bit about how we view the world and how we view ourselves. Drawing on the vast collections of the British Museum, this book explores imagery of our fellow creatures—real, surreal, and imaginary—in 350 works of art and beautiful ritual objects. Famous masterpieces mix with little-seen artifacts from every age and around the globe, including a 3500-year-old painting of a Minoan acrobat leaping onto a bull, a splendid Roman mosaic of a lobster, an Egyptian bronze sculpture of a cat, Hiroshige's woodblock print of a carp windsock, and a miniature Ice Age mammoth juxtaposed with an ancient engraved drawing of a horse.