"The radiographic images in this book largely follow scientific, not artistic, conventions," writes Lynne Parenti, the Smithsonian's curator of fishes. Indeed, each page contains one kind of fish, arranged from the simplest jawless fishes at the book's beginning to the most complex spiny-finned species at the end.

But Ichthyo's ghostly black-and-white images are an artistic achievement as well. As the Albert Einstein quote on one page says, "The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science."