Empfehlungen basierend auf "Sad Animal Facts"

Centring on the discovery in the Burgess Shale of 530 million year old fossils unique in age, preservation and diversity, this book challenges perceptions about man's place in the history of life.

Join zoologist Mark Carwardine and Britain's best-loved wit and raconteur, Stephen Fry, as they follow in their great friend Douglas Adams' footsteps, in search of some of the rarest and most threatened animals on Earth. Twenty years ago, zoologist Mark Carwardine teamed up with the late Douglas Adams (author of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and together they embarked on a groundbreaking expedition, travelling the globe in search of some of the world's most endangered animals. Now Mark has teamed up with one of Douglas's closest friends -- comic genius Stephen Fry -- to see how all those animals have been faring in the years since. In Last Chance to See, and the accompanying major BBC television series, we follow the unlikely duo on six separate journeys which take them from the steamy jungles of the Amazon to the ice-covered mountain tops of New Zealand and from the edge of a war zone in Central Africa to a sub-tropical paradise in the North Pacific. Along the way, they search for some of the weirdest, most remarkable and most troubled creatures on earth: a large, black, sleepy animal easily mistaken for an unusually listless mudbank, a parrot with a song like an unreleased collection of Pink Floyd studio outtakes, a rhino with square lips, a dragon with deadly saliva, an animal roughly the length of a Boeing 737 and the creature most likely to emerge from the cargo doors of a spaceship. A unique insight into the disappearing world around us, this is their hilarious, entertaining, informative and thought-provoking story.

"THE ULTIMATE DINOSAUR BIOGRAPHY," hails Scientific American: A thrilling new history of the age of dinosaurs, from one of our finest young scientists."A masterpiece of science writing." —Washington PostA New York Times Bestseller • Goodreads Choice Awards Winner • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Smithsonian, Science Friday, The Times (London), Popular Mechanics, Science News"This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." —NatureThe dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers—themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period—into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs’ peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.”Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research—which he calls “a new golden age of discovery”—and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs’ epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.Includes 75 images, world maps of the prehistoric earth, and a dinosaur family tree.

'One of the most influential books about the natural world ever published' Paul Kingsnorth, Guardian 'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,' begins Aldo Leopold's totemic work of ecological thought. Ranging from lyrical observations of the changing seasons over a year on his Wisconsin farm to his hugely influential idea of a 'land ethic' signifying moral equilibrium between humans and all other life on earth, A Sand County Almanac changed perceptions of the natural world and helped give birth to the modern conservation movement.'An unequivocal statement of conscience that will carry down the generations ... his argument seems more urgently true now than ever' The New York Times

From Giant Panda porn-watching evenings to the often inaccurate firing of love darts from the common garden snail. From the frenzied mating bundles formed by snakes lucky enough to have two penises, to the unlucky female bean weevil who has to put up with the spiked and barbed protuberance of her mate, this beautifully illustrated and hilariously informative manual will broaden your mind and make you look upon Mother Nature's achievements with new-found respect. Filled with little-known scientific facts (and fantastic top trumps tables listing copulation frequency and duration, relative penis to body size, interesting anatomical quirks, and remarkable 'did you know' anecdotes), written with a delightfully humorous tone and illustrated with 50 colour photographs this is the perfect stocking filler for anyone and everyone who's ever wondered what went on inside the ark.

Farming is the world's greatest cause of environmental destruction - and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticise urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have ploughed, fenced and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry.Now the food system itself is beginning to falter. But, as George Monbiot shows us in this brilliant, bracingly original new book, there is another way.Regenesis is a breathtaking vision of a new future for food and for humanity. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how new discoveries about the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming, and transform our relationship with the living planet. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower who is revolutionising our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and poisons; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how the tiniest life forms could help us resolve the biggest of our dilemmas: how to feed the world without devouring the planet.Here, for the first time, is a thrilling vision of abundant, cheap and healthy food, which could trigger a shift as profound as the invention of agriculture. Here is a new cuisine that would let us make peace with the planet, restore its living systems, and replace the age of extinction with an age of regenesis.

Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from the rest of nature, more and more scientific evidence is emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing. So what happens, asks acclaimed journalist Lucy Jones, as we lose our bond with the natural world--might we also be losing part of ourselves?Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, via Poland's primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Urgent and uplifting, Losing Eden is a rallying cry for a wilder way of life - for finding asylum in the soil and joy in the trees - which might just help us to save the living planet, as well as ourselves, from a future of ecological grief.

Only in the past century have Americans been able to see their country from the air, to view its majestic natural and manmade topography and muse how it came to look the way it does. Landscape architect James Corner and aerial photographer Alex MacLean now present breathtaking photographs, exquisite map-drawings, and thoughtful essays that record their flights across the continental United States and express their growing understanding of the way the American landscape has been forged by various cultures in the past and what the possibilities are for its future design. The book traces the influence on the American landscape of the Anasazi and the Hopi in the southwest, the French along the Mississippi, the British in the east, the pioneer Americans across the plains, and the technological society across much of modern-day America. It investigates the ways in which landscape representation--particularly aerial vision--not only reflects a given reality but also constitutes a way of seeing and acting in the world. It discusses the many meanings of measure--from practical (such as solar furnaces in California) to poetic (such as raised tablets in Illinois that once formed the structure of an ancient city). And it suggests alternative possibilities for planning and taking future measures in our environment, building upon examples that range from the rectilinear survey landscape to the great transportation networks and such technological innovations as windmill fields, pivot-irrigation systems, and radio-telescope installations.

A New York Times Bestseller Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? In What a Fish Knows, the myth-busting ethologist Jonathan Balcombe addresses these questions and more, taking us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Although there are more than thirty thousand species of fish—more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined—we rarely consider how individual fishes think, feel, and behave. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian—in other words, much like us. What a Fish Knows draws on the latest science to present a fresh look at these remarkable creatures in all their breathtaking diversity and beauty. Fishes conduct elaborate courtship rituals and develop lifelong bonds with shoalmates. They also plan, hunt cooperatively, use tools, curry favor, deceive one another, and punish wrongdoers. We may imagine that fishes lead simple, fleeting lives—a mode of existence that boils down to a place on the food chain, rote spawning, and lots of aimless swimming. But, as Balcombe demonstrates, the truth is far richer and more complex, worthy of the grandest social novel. Highlighting breakthrough discoveries from fish enthusiasts and scientists around the world and pondering his own encounters with fishes, Balcombe examines the fascinating means by which fishes gain knowledge of the places they inhabit, from shallow tide pools to the deepest reaches of the ocean. Teeming with insights and exciting discoveries, What a Fish Knows offers a thoughtful appraisal of our relationships with fishes and inspires us to take a more enlightened view of the planet’s increasingly imperiled marine life. What a Fish Knows will forever change how we see our aquatic cousins—the pet goldfish included.