Animal Evolution

The domestic cat—your cat—has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successful and diverse species on the planet. Jonathan Losos, writing as both a scientist and a cat lover, explores how researchers today are unraveling the secrets of the cat, past and present, using all the tools of modern technology, from GPS tracking (you’d be amazed where those backyard cats roam) and genomics (what is your so-called Siamese cat . . . really?) to forensic archaeology.

Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Following his international bestseller, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, acclaimed zoologist Arik Kershenbaum draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the animal kingdom’s most seemingly confusing or untranslatable signals are in fact logical and consistent—and not that different from our own.

What is animal welfare? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as "health and animals having what they want", a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare.

Mary Roach meets Sam Kean and Bill Bryson in this uproarious tour of the basest instincts and biggest mysteries of the animal world. In The Truth About Animals, Lucy Cooke takes us on a worldwide journey to meet everyone from a Colombian hippo castrator to a Chinese panda porn peddler, all to lay bare the secret - and often hilarious - habits of the animal kingdom. Charming and at times downright weird, this modern bestiary is perfect for anyone who has ever suspected that virtue might be unnatural.

Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe - descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished.

More than half a billion years ago, our world was completely covered by glaciers, a "Snowball Earth" that persisted for millions of years. Incredibly, this unimaginable cold led to the remarkable diversification of life on earth known as the Cambrian explosion. With a geologist's eye and a knack for storytelling, Graham Shields explores when and how such inhospitable conditions enabled animals to evolve, radiate, and diversify into our earliest ancestors.

A fantastic collection of 30 stories about animals of all shapes and sizes, this will charm children aged six and up. From pet puppies to woodland wildlife, garden birds to pond-dwelling frogs, Enid Blyton was a devoted and knowledgeable animal lover. Listeners who feel the same way are bound to love her wonderful stories about our furry friends - and scaly, feathery or fluttery ones, too!

New York Times best-selling author Jon Katz offers us a deeper understanding of the inner and outer lives of animals and teaches us how we can more effectively communicate with them, made real by his own remarkable research and experiences with a wide array of creatures great and small.

It is now known that we live in a galaxy with more planets than stars. The Milky Way alone encompasses 30 trillion potential home planets. Scientists Trefil and Summers bring listeners on a marvelous experimental voyage through the possibilities of life-unlike anything we have experienced so far - that could exist on planets outside our own solar system.

Without our domesticated plants and animals, human civilization as we know it would not exist. We would still be living at subsistence level as hunter-gatherers if not for domestication. It is no accident that the cradle of civilization - the Middle East - is where sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and cats commenced their fatefully intimate associations with humans.

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs - they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken - imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time.

The Territorial Imperative is a work of wit, of literary wealth, of high adventure. The author draws on his inexhaustible knowledge of animal ways and takes his listeners on deep excursions into the ancient animal world, and on deep penetrations of the contemporary human wilderness.

The author of Seven Daughters of Eve returns with a lively account of how all dogs are descended from a mere handful of wolves.

Interweaving her own first-hand experiences in the field with the compelling research of premier scientists, Goodall illuminates the heroic efforts of dedicated environmentalists and the truly critical need to protect the habitats of these beloved species. At once a celebration of the animal kingdom and a passionate call to arms, Hope for Animals and Their World presents an uplifting, hopeful message for the future of animal-human coexistence.

Alys was seven when the soul eaters came to her village. These soul eaters, twin sisters who were abandoned by their father and slowly morphed into something not quite human, devour human souls. Alys, and all the other children, were spared - and they were sent to live in a neighboring village. There the devout people created a strict world where good and evil are as fundamental as the nursery rhymes children sing. Fear of the soul eaters - and of the Beast they believe guides them - rules village life.

In 1955, on a visit to South Africa, Robert Ardrey became aware of the growing evidence that man had evolved on the African continent from carnivorous, predatory stock - ones who had also, long before man, achieved the use of weapons. A dramatist, Ardrey's interest in the African discoveries sprang less from purely scientific grounds than from the radical new light they cast on the eternal question: Why do we behave as we do? Are we naturally inclined towards war and weapons?

We often consider dogs to be our enduring sidekicks, but the truth is domestic pigs have played a role in our lives for nearly as long. Pigs are highly social and smart. They like to play. They’re inventive, crafty and belligerent - and incredibly single-minded. Ultimately, we have far more in common with these creatures than we like to admit. Here is a charming ode to one of the most common yet surprisingly intelligent animals populating our landscapes.

There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the 20th century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other killed none. Jeffrey Masson’s fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species.

For over a century, opening the black box of embryonic development was the holy grail of biology. Evo Devo--Evolutionary Developmental Biology--is the new science that has finally cracked open the box. Within the pages of his rich and riveting book, Sean B. Carroll explains how we are discovering that complex life is ironically much simpler than anyone ever expected.