Animal A Day!

By Tim Flannery, illustrated by Peter Schouten Hardcover : 192 pages September 10, 2001 A Gap in Nature : Discovering the World's Extinct Animals is an illustrating world representing nearly all of the animals that have gone extinct since the year 1500. (A list in back contains other animals and the reasons for why they weren't included.) Each entry contains information about the creature- where it lived, how it died, what its behavior was like- and a fully colored illustration. The book contains some well known extinctions, like the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, and the Carolina Parakeet. It also has dozens of animals that you may have never knew existed, like the Bulldog Rat and Atitlan Grebe. What amazed me is the number of birds, and island birds at that. So many of those species were only found on a few tiny islands, and died out so quickly after human contact that we know little about them. I'd recommend this book to any animal lover. The illustrations are go...

By Richard Ellis Paperback : 336 Pages October 1, 1999 Richard Ellis is one of the foremost painters of Marine Natural History art in the United States, and is an accomplished writer on the subject to boot. He’s published roughly 80 magazine and journal articles, and over a dozen books. The Search for the Giant Squid , published in 1999, tells the fantastic tale of genus Architeuthis , the largest animals in the world to have never been seen alive (at time of publication, see blow). Ellis recounts our history with the Squid, and the mythology that it inspired. Tales of sea serpents and the formidable Kraken were no doubt misinterpretations of Squid sightings, and these sightings continued to baffle sailors well into the modern era. Even today there is so little known about the Giant Squid. Ellis details our fascination with Architeuthis , and how we’ve struggled to hunt down and understand these giants among animals. Aside from covering the Squids biology and natural history, cha...