For those of us who love bones and big beautiful books, the cover of Evolution is the doorway to heaven. Indeed, it wouldn’t be a bad design for just such a portal. Most of the cover — nearly a foot square and tar black — is filled with a vivid photograph of a rattlesnake skeleton arranged in a spiral resembling the DNA helix. Stretched above the rattler, letter spaced, in type as slender and white as snake ribs, are the nine letters of the title. When has a single word and a bunch of bones said so much, with such visual forcefulness and social coding, and in such elegant fashion? It was the serpent, after all, that coaxed Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Trust me, you will not be able to resist the temptation to open this massive volume and slowly, pleasurably make your way through its hundreds of pages of extraordinary black and white photographs, by Patrick Gries, of the skeletons of mandrills, anteaters, horned lizards, swans, sea lions, aardvarks, Homo sapiens, red-necked wallabies, sloths and dozens and dozens more of this planet’s creatures. The crisply written text, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu, moves from “Architecture,” “The Birth of Species” and “Seduction and Selection” to “Evolutionary Tinkering,” “The Power of the Environment” and, finally, “Evolution and Time.” Darwin would have approved.