Natural history prints span a wide range. At one end: reproductions of Victorian engravings, pleasant but passive. At the other: contemporary scientific illustration that engages seriously with its subjects - accurate, precise, designed to reward close attention.
Axisophy sits firmly at the second end. Here are the strongest natural history prints across the collections.
The Bugs collection - 44 prints adapted from the book Bugs by Simon Tyler (Pavilion Books, 2017) - covers the major insect orders with scientific illustration precision. Some highlights:
The Violin Beetle (Mormolyce phyllodes) has a body plan so unusual that early entomologists struggled to classify it. Flat enough to slide between bracket fungi layers, with leaf-like elytra unlike anything else in Coleoptera.
The Madagascan Sunset Moth (Chrysiridia rhipheus) produces its iridescent colours through nanoscale optical structures rather than pigment. The colour shifts with the viewing angle in ways that photographs cannot capture and the print gets closest to.
The Bhutan Glory (Bhutanitis lidderdalii) is a CITES-listed swallowtail from the Eastern Himalayas with a wing pattern of geometric precision. Rarely seen in the wild.
The Stag Beetle (Lucanus cervus) is Britain's largest beetle and a protected species. The male's oversized mandibles are used for wrestling rivals. The illustration gives the animal the scale and attention it deserves.
Four phylogenetic tree prints, each mapping 500 species by their evolutionary relationships using published molecular data:
Each print works as both a scientific reference and a graphic object. Up close: the specific relationships between individual species. From a distance: a structured, rhythmic field of branches.
The Radiance collection - NASA HiRISE orbital photography of Mars - is natural history of a different kind. The surface features documented in these prints are real geological formations on another planet: dune fields that migrate measurably between orbital passes, impact craters that record single violent events millions of years ago, polar ice formations carved by sublimation at minus 100 degrees Celsius.
All prints from £50, free UK delivery. Browse at axisophy.com.
Simon Tyler is a designer, illustrator and author based in St Leonards-on-Sea. He is the author and illustrator of Bugs (Pavilion, 2017), Adventures in Space (Pavilion, 2018), Adventures on Earth (Pavilion, 2019) and Emergency Vehicles (Faber & Faber, 2020), and the illustrator of The World's Most Magnificent Machines (Faber & Faber, 2020). His forthcoming book Gizmo: Retro-Tech We Loved and Lost will be published by Laurence King in May 2026.