Vanishing Treasures A Bestiary Of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures Katherine Rundell by Katherine Rundell 9780385550833, 0385550839 instant download after payment.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, & more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant & passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life & meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting & changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel…

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“Rundell’s approach in schooling readers about the plight of the creatures that live on our planet isn’t solely to beat us over the head with doomsday arguments about the ruinous effects of climate change, habitat destruction & human intervention in Earth’s ecosystems. There’s some of that, sure. But she also does something kind of genius: She first coaxes us into caring by plying us with spellbinding stories & a cornucopia of incredibly strange but true trivia about 23 species currently facing extinction…

In witty, enlightening & never-dry prose, she reminds us of all the myriad ways in which the survival rate of these creatures is threatened — and some of the things we humans can do to counteract or prevent things like trophy hunting & deforestation.” — Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle