Visualizing change over time can be incredibly difficult. Which is why in a new Phaidon book entitled Evolution: A Visual Record, Robert Clark’s vivid and compelling photographs serve as an ode to Charles Darwin’s scientific breakthrough.

Beginning with text by David Quammen and Joseph Wallace about Darwin’s The Origin of Species, it is filled with photographs and facts about evolution, some of them startling. While there are rough estimates for the number of species of mammals on Earth (around 5,000) and birds (around 10,000), insect species estimates lie anywhere between 1 million to 30 million. And there continues to be discoveries, such as this giant amphibious centipede.

The adaptive skills of insects is seen in the above photo. According to the book, color and shape of both the dead leaf mantis (genus Deroplatys, left) and true leaf insect or “walking leaf” (family Phylliidae, right) changed over the years.

From insects to humans, Clark’s photographs capture a sense of wonder over life on earth. As Darwin described at the end of The Origin of Species: ”…whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

Here is a selection of Clark’s photographs and accompanying text from the book.

“The hands of a gorilla. Despite the fact that humans are bipedal and gorillas usually walk on all four limbs, the two species’ hands are closer in proportion to each other than to those of any other ape, including Homo sapiens’ closer relative, the tool-using chimpanzee.”