An illustration from The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, edited by Charles Darwin, portrays a Falklands wolf: Darwin predicted this native of the Falkland Islands, which had no fear of humans, would soon be extinct.

There is no attempt to disguise our abuse of the planet or the vanishing of species. That is not to accuse it of shallow humanism. If it has a thesis it’s a defence of human curiosity. This exhibition is a cabinet of curiosities, tolerantly enjoying error and accuracy, happy to set the impossible beside the real. Unreliable images … drawings by Samuel Fallours. The pulp cover art of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws is shown next to Nicolas Steno’s 1669 engraving of a Great White Shark’s head, in which the visibly shrivelled flesh of the preserved specimen does not diminish the scale and terror of that mouth. We may think we have outgrown medieval marvels, but we still can’t see straight when it comes to sharks. But above it hangs a scientifically correct 18th-century study of a deep sea viperfish by Mark Catesby that’s just as mystifying. A Renaissance map by Abraham Ortelius shows the sea populated by hybrids that blend mammal, fish, reptile and even human features: you can almost hear the sailors in dockside inns telling Ortelius about the monsters they have seen. Yet when it comes to the sea, fact is often as weird as fiction.

As late as 1718, supposedly in the Enlightenment, the Dutch artist Samuel Fallours was illustrating a book on tropical fishes with unreliable images of brightly coloured creatures, including a mermaid baring her breasts as she flicks her long blue tail. The contrast with Paris’s careful study of an elephant, centuries earlier, shows the invention of the printing press didn’t instantly lead to modern science but instead proliferated fakes and fictions, like Renaissance social media. Roll up to meet the Monkfish, a fish that looks just like a monk! This is how an illustration from Pierre Belon’s 1551 book The Natural History of Strange Sea Fishes depicts the creature: its human head is tonsured and its scales are shaped into monastic robes. Yet it also revels in the fabulous, impossible dreams we have made of them. From this early attempt at scientific natural history, to a tiny drawing of a bird in flight from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, to Ludwig Koch’s pioneering 1953 gramophone record of British bird songs, Animals explores how human beings have sought to observe and understand our fellow species. To medieval folk, an elephant was a monstrous legendary beast from their myths of faraway lands – yet Paris pins this fantastic being to reality, tying it down with his objective gaze. This 13th-century portrait of an elephant encapsulates the paradoxical delights of the British Library’s cornucopia of animal art.

A world of curiosities a novel reviews