Jenkins medium was paper: torn (a method good for fur) or sliced with an X-Acto knife, which he assembled so precisely that his images, such as the delicate shading of a rhinoceross baggy skin, looked as if he had painted them. So Jenkins made a wordless book called Looking Down (1995), a visual journey from outer space to a childs backyard. When his daughter Page was 2 or 3, she wondered why the houses and cars she saw out of an airplane window were so small. His own childrens questions jump-started many books. (Its vomit is so stinky because of the toxins in the grasshoppers that the chicks are fed by their parents.) That last category included the European roller chick, which vomits all over itself to ward off predators. His ∾xtreme Animals series covered the trickiest, the speediest, the deadliest and the stinkiest of animals. (At the back of its eye is a reflective layer called a tapetum, which bounces light back through the cats retina.)

Insatiably curious himself, Jenkins combined the rigor of scientific inquiry with exquisite illustrations and clear language to explore subjects like animal sight: His ∾ye to Eye: How Animals See the World (2014) explains how a house cat sees in the dark. How many ways can you catch a fly? And who eats flies, anyway? Why do turtles clean hippopotamuses, and how? What do you do if you work at the zoo? What do baby animals do the day theyre born? How do animals talk to each other? How do birds make a nest? His books, often written with Page, answered the sort of questions, posed by children (as well as still-curious grown-ups) about animals and the world around them.

His wife, Robin Page, said the cause was a splenic artery aneurysm. Steve Jenkins, an award-winning childrens book author and illustrator whose passion for science, as well as his meticulous and vibrant cut-paper collages, brought the natural world to life, died Dec.

Life on Earth by Steve Jenkins