Sleeping Beauties review: The strange nature of nature’s inventiveness

Sleeping Beauties
Andreas Wagner (Oneworld Publications)

THE world’s grasses waited a long time for their day in the sun. They evolved in the late Cretaceous, not long before the dinosaurs were wiped out. But for tens of millions of years, they were rare. Only relatively recently have parts of Earth become dominated by sweeping grasslands.

Sleeping Beauties: The mystery of dormant innovations in nature and culture argues that, in both evolution and human technology, innovations must often …