The inspiring exploration stories of natural scientists in the field from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries The history of natural science is often a case of truth being stranger than fiction, as is evidenced by these 22 rollicking tales of men and women risking life and limb in the name of science and the cause of the broadening of human knowledge. Among the tales are Maria Sibylla Merian, who, with her daughter, traveled to Surinam in 1699 to study the life cycle of local spiders, plants, and moths; brilliant Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and his travels in Lapland; Alexander von Humboldt and his travels down the Amazon; fossil collector Mary Anning, who found the first connected skeleton of an" Ichthyosaurus"; George Forrest, one of the first explorers of China's mountain ranges in Yunnan; and Roy Chapman, the American paleontologist upon whom Indiana Jones is based and who was the first to find dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert.