I picked up The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson.  This an A-to-Z list of real animals, nominally modeled after a medieval bestiary so I assumed, quite reasonably I think, that it would be a coffee table book with lots of pictures.   It is not.  There are lots of words and very few pictures.  It is shameful how publishers let people inflict words on their readers.

To make up for this, I am looking up the pictures on line.  The axolotl, for example:

A salamander that looks cute, freakish, or disturbingly like a homonculus in the D&D Monster's Manual I had in the '80s, depending on your point of view.  Sadly seems to be doomed in the wild (it's range was only Mexican lakes to begin with) but will survive in laboratories studying regeneration and among aquarium owners.

Other things learned: Apparently the first air-breathing vertebrates evolved to thrive in murky, shallow waters where (like our friend about) they could run around on their short stubby legs and do little push-ups to gulp in oxygen that was in short supply in the water itself.  I'm not sure what I thought the driving force was, maybe just fish and beaches and something more like this: