Peer inside the mouths of animals with scientist Letizia Diamante’s book, ‘Open Wide!: Jaw-dropping mouths of the animal world’

Ever wanted to look inside the mouths of your favourite animals, maybe to count their teeth or see how long their tongues are? Well a new children’s book by Cambridge-based scientist and author Letizia Diamante allows you to do just that (without getting your head bitten off in the process).

Open Wide!: Jaw-dropping mouths of the animal world is the second book by Letizia Diamante, a University of Cambridge alumna (she studied for her PhD in biochemistry at Murray Edwards College between 2009 and 2013), and it is beautifully illustrated by Ed J Brown.

Readers of the book, which was published in September last year by What on Earth!, can learn all about what’s inside the mouths of a wide variety of animals, from the awesome jaws of the great white shark to the tiny teeth of the garden snail.

Letizia, who is from a small village in North East Italy, says that the idea of her books is to make science “accessible and engaging” for everyone, and in this case “for children and for families”.

On the subject of Open Wide!, she continues: “It’s an exploration of the science of the mouth.

“This book has 64 pages and the illustrator is Ed J Brown – I believe his style is really nice, especially the cover, which is really eye-catching.

“I think parents and their kids can have fun reading it because there are so many fun facts; I can promise that there will be at least one fun fact that they didn’t know!

“But I think also teachers might be interested in it because they can use it to approach topics maybe related to teeth – human teeth as well as animal teeth – maybe the difference between herbivores and carnivores, the diets of animals, and also evolution.

“We live in Cambridge and this is where Charles Darwin studied. Charles Darwin explored the Galapagos Islands and he found 12 species of finch, and he made a point that they looked different and they had different beaks – so it means they adapted to eat different things.

“So this would be a good connection with Cambridge, I thought!”

Letizia, who says she was surprised by “so many things” while carrying out her research for the book, recalls that she first had the idea to contact the publisher about it after visiting Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology.

“I already had the idea of writing something about the mouth,” she explains, “because I was thinking about topics that are common, that everybody can relate to.

“For example, in the case of the mouth, I was thinking about the rite-of-passage of everybody has to lose their milk teeth.

“And this is something I really didn’t like when I was a child, and maybe other children could also find this process a little bit traumatising, but then I was thinking, ‘OK, what happens with animals?’

“There are some animals with these big teeth, like elephants and sharks, who have so many teeth – so I was crazy about this idea of teeth.

“Then when I went to the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, I got inspired.”

Letizia left Cambridge after finishing her PhD, returning to live here in 2020. She says the book is laid out so it has a picture of an animal on a page and, when you turn that page, you see the same animal but with its mouth open.

“It’s the idea that you can peek inside the mouth of animals that you wouldn’t normally be able to see,” she notes.

“So you can count how many teeth the tiger has, you can look at the long tongue of the chameleon, you can see the teeth of the beaver and the elephant… I thought this was a curious way to represent that.”

The book also highlights the fact that animals don’t just use their mouths for eating.

“There is a fish that can climb waterfalls using a sucker that is part of the mouth,” observes Letizia, who works for several organisations as a science communicator, “and you have another fish that is a mouth breeder – it holds the eggs in its mouth – and there are so many other examples.”

She adds that the animal with the largest mouth on Earth is the bowhead whale, and also notes that the book contains games and activities for children.

Letizia will be presenting Open Wide!: Jaw-dropping mouths of the animal world at the Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology on Robinson Way, as part of the Cambridge Festival, on Saturday, 22 March, at various times throughout the day.

Reserve a spot for this free event at eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-wide-jaw-dropping-jaws-tickets-1225023601569.

She will also be discussing it at the Union Library, as part of the Cambridge Literary Festival, on Sunday, 27 April, at 12pm.

For more on this free event, go to cambridgeliteraryfestival.com. Find out more about Letizia at letiziadiamante.com.