Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself

What benefit is there to an individual animal — or a species as a whole — in, say, a dog's play-bow or a piglet's somersaults? In Kingdom of Play, David Toomey examines the nature, meaning, and mysteries of the playful behaviour of a wide variety of animals, from bumblebees to humans. The author weaves a wealth of serious scientific knowledge about the distinctive features of play, its prevalence in the animal kingdom, its evolutionary history and neurobiology, and its impact on the lives of individuals and the trajectory of species development into a fascinating and coherent narrative. Toomey presents play as a product of natural selection that is far from unique to humans and, at the same time, as a rich source of material.

David Toomey. Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself / Translated from English by Maria Eliferova. Editor Olga Volkova. — Moscow: CORPUS, 2025.