The Just So Stories began as bedtime stories told by Kipling to his daughter 'Effie' (Josephine, Kipling's firstborn) when the first three were published in a children's magazine, a year before her death, Kipling explained: 'in the evening there were stories meant to put Effie to sleep, and you were not allowed to alter those by one single little word. In it, Mowgli hears the story of how the tiger got his stripes. A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's 'How Fear Came', in The Second Jungle Book (1895). The stories, first published in 1902, are origin stories, fantastic accounts of how various features of animals came to be.

Evolutionary biologists have noted that what Kipling did in fiction in a Lamarckian way, they have done in reality, providing Darwinian explanations for the evolutionary development of animal features. The stories have appeared in a variety of adaptations including a musical and animated films. For the book, Kipling illustrated the stories himself. The stories illustrate how animals acquired their distinctive features, such as how the leopard got his spots. These had to be told 'just so' (exactly in the words she was used to) or she would complain. Kipling began working on the book by telling the first three chapters as bedtime stories to his daughter Josephine. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is among Kipling's best known works. Just So Stories for Little Children is a 1902 collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling.

Just so stories animals