Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom is a 2005 book by Sean B. Carroll

Sean B. Carroll

Sean B. Carroll is a Professor of Molecular Biology, Genetics, and Medical Genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studies the evolution of cis-regulation in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system...

. It attempts to summarize the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology

Evolutionary developmental biology

Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine the ancestral relationship between them, and to discover how developmental processes evolved...

 and has won numerous awards for science communication. The title is a reference to a a quote by Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

; Darwin described the descent of all living organisms from a common ancestor

Last universal ancestor

The last universal ancestor , also called the last universal common ancestor , or the cenancestor, is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend. Thus it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth...

"endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful".

The Creative Machines Laboratory at Cornell University operates a website called "EndlessForms.com" that allows one to evolve three-dimensional shapes according to the principles laid out in Endless Forms Most Beautiful.