No creature has quite the sting in our mythology and folklore as the scorpion. From the dawn of human civilization they have been a dangerous figure in our imaginations--poisonous, precise, and deadly quiet--but as Louise M. Pryke shows in this book, their bad reputation has overshadowed many exceptional qualities. Scurrying across hundreds of millions of years and across every continent except Antarctica, this book gives the scorpion its due as one of nature's longest lasting survivors.
Indeed scorpions are older than dinosaurs. An ancient arthropod, their form--notable for its pair of...

The ancient Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, and the Christians associated them with their divine savior. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both wild and domestic species of ovis, from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, from the Trojan sheep of Homer s Odyssey to the cannibal sheep of Thomas More s Utopia, from the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos all the way to Dolly the first animal we have ever cloned and Haruki Murakami s sheep-human hybrids.
As...

Unlike their gaudy day-flying cousins, moths seem to reside in the shadows as denizens of the night, circling around streetlights or caught momentarily in the glare of headlights on a country lane. As Matthew Gandy demonstrates in this book, however, there are many more species of day-flying moths than there are butterflies, and many rival butterflies in a dazzling range of markings.
Gandy shows that the study of moths formed an integral part of early natural history. Many thousands of drawings, paintings, and physical specimens remain in museum collections, and in recent years there has...

They are famously fat--cumbersome, lethargic, and oddly charming for the way they lounge around half-submerged in muddy pools all day. Hippos are gregarious herbivores that don't much like the heat, but as Edgar Williams shows in this colorful book, they can also be quite ill-tempered, and their huge mouths, sharp tusks, and powerful jaws can cut a small boat right in half. Taking readers into the swampy lands of Africa--as well as a few other surprising places--Hippopotamus tells the story of these iconic lumbering beasts.

As Williams recounts, while Hippos are only found in...

"Top-notch street lit...one of the top urban fiction novels of the year." -- Library Journal Starred Review on Diamonds and Pearl

'K'wan does a masterful job of keeping readers on their toes right up to the very last page.' -- Publishers Weekly Re-Mastered featuring Bonus material. Also includes a sneak peek at The Good Son: A Hoodlum Novel.
From the moment Animal's former lover Red Sonja showed up on his doorstep, he knew trouble wouldn't be far behind. It wasn't because the last time he'd seen her, he had been fleeing for his life from a strange...

Though not generally perceived as graceful, crows are remarkably so--a single curve undulates from the tip of the bird's beak to the end of its tail. They take flight almost without effort, flapping their wings easily and ascending into the air like spirits. Crow by Boria Sax is a celebration of the crow and its relatives in myth, literature, and life.

Sax takes readers into the history of crows, detailing how in a range of cultures, from the Chinese to the Hopi Indians, crows are bearers of prophecy. For example, thanks in part to the birds' courtship rituals, Greeks invoked...

Zebra is a comprehensive and wide-ranging study of the natural and cultural history of this popular animal.