All of those organisms are rooted in a single origin, with a common code that underwrites our existence. This paradox - that our biology is indistinct from all life, yet we consider ourselves to be special - lies at the heart of who we are.In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores how many of the things once considered to be exclusively human are not: we are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, utilises fire, or has sex for reasons other than to make new versions of ourselves. Evolution has, however, allowed us to develop our culture to a level of complexity that outstrips any other observed in nature.THE BOOK OF HUMANS tells the story of how we became the creatures we are today, bestowed with the unique ability to investigate what makes us who we are. Illuminated by the latest scientific discoveries, it is a thrilling compendium of what unequivocally fixes us as animals, and reveals how we are extraordinary among them.

    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.

    . . . Anyone with the slightest interest in biology should read this book."--The New York Times Book Review"A marvelous museum of the past four billion years on earth--capacious, jammed with treasures, full of learning and wide-eyed wonder."--The Boston GlobeFrom its origins on the still-forming planet to the recent emergence of Homo sapiens--one of the world's leading paleontologists offers an absorbing account of how and why life on earth developed as it did. Interlacing the tale of his own adventures in the field with vivid descriptions of creatures who emerged and disappeared in the long march of geologic time, Richard Fortey sheds light upon a fascinating array of evolutionary wonders, mysteries, and debates. Brimming with wit, literary style, and the joy of discovery, this is an indispensable book that will delight the general reader and the scientist alike."A drama bolder and more sweeping than Gone with the Wind . . . a pleasure to read."--Science"A beautifully written and structured work . . . packed with lucid expositions of science."--Natural History

    The "star" of the show is the star-nosed mole, with its nose containing some 25,000 touch-sensitive nerve organs and the ability to gobble small invertebrate prey in world record-breaking time. The mole was author's first real biological assignment; his "strange path of discovery" is brilliantly documented, from figuring how to find and capture his elusive subject to eventually mapping its brain. He also studies tentacled snakes that deploy some devilish hunting strategies, worms that leave the ground in response to "grunts," eels that paralyze their prey with Taser-like jolts, bloodthirsty water shrews, and zombie-making wasps. The author's witty style and amazing findings are complemented by stunning photography and movie shorts that readers with smart phones can scan and play. The astonishing animals are only half the story. Just as compelling is the enquiring-human side--i.e., seeing a scientist at work (and at play), applying a Sherlockian credo

    This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.

    Drawing deep from personal experience, cutting-edge science, and colorful history, he spins captivating stories about the birds in our midst and reveals the startlingly intimate coexistence of birds and humans.

    Most of us appreciate that at some level. But what does it mean for us to have more in common with a horse and an elephant than we do with a parrot, snake or frog?After a misdirected football left new father Liam Drew clutching a uniquely mammalian part of his anatomy, he decided to find out more. Considering himself as a mammal first and a human second, Liam delves into ancient biological history to understand what it means to be mammalian.In his humorous and engaging style, Liam explores the different characteristics that distinguish mammals from other types of animals. He charts the evolution of milk, warm blood and burgeoning brains, and examines the emergence of sophisticated teeth, exquisite ears, and elaborate reproductive biology, plus a host of other mammalian innovations. Entwined are tales of zoological peculiarities and reflections on how being a mammal has shaped the author's life.I, Mammal is a history of mammals and their ancestors and of how science came to grasp mammalian evolution. And in celebrating our mammalian-ness, Liam Drew binds us a little more tightly to the five and a half thousand other species of mammal on this planet and reveals the deep roots of many traits humans hold dear.

    But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the south-east United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea. Everywhere is the deep imprint of the planetary on the human.From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, Origins reveals the breathtaking impact of the earth beneath our feet on the shape of our human civilizations.

    They have brains that are huge for their body size and exhibit an avian kind of eloquence. They mate for life and associate with relatives and neighbors for years. And because they often live near people—in our gardens, parks, and cities—they are also keenly aware of our peculiarities, staying away from and even scolding anyone who threatens or harms them and quickly learning to recognize and approach those who care for and feed them, even giving them numerous, oddly touching gifts in return. With his extraordinary research on the intelligence and startling abilities of corvids—crows, ravens, and jays—scientist John Marzluff teams up with artist-naturalist Tony Angell to tell amazing stories of these brilliant birds in Gifts of the Crow. With narrative, diagrams, and gorgeous line drawings, they offer an in-depth look at these complex creatures and our shared behaviors. The ongoing connection between humans and crows—a cultural coevolution—has shaped both species for millions of years. And the characteristics of crows that allow this symbiotic relationship are language, delinquency, frolic, passion, wrath, risk-taking, and awareness—seven traits that humans find strangely familiar. Crows gather around their dead, warn of impending doom, recognize people, commit murder of other crows, lure fish and birds to their death, swill coffee, drink beer, turn on lights to stay warm, design and use tools, use cars as nutcrackers, windsurf and sled to play, and work in tandem to spray soft cheese out of a can. Their marvelous brains allow them to think, plan, and reconsider their actions. With its abundance of funny, awe-inspiring, and poignant stories, Gifts of the Crow portrays creatures who are nothing short of amazing. A testament to years of painstaking research and careful observation, this fully illustrated, riveting work is a thrilling look at one of nature’s most wondrous creatures.

    Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few spent time studying it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh-eaters. But the true nature of cannibalism--the role it plays in evolution as well as human history--is even more intriguing (and more normal) than the misconceptions we've come to accept as fact. In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, zoologist Bill Schutt sets the record straight, debunking common myths and investigating our new understanding of cannibalism's role in biology, anthropology, and history in the most fascinating account yet written on this complex topic. Schutt takes readers from Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, where he wades through ponds full of tadpoles devouring their siblings, to the Sierra Nevadas, where he joins researchers who are shedding new light on what happened to the Donner Party--the most infamous episode of cannibalism in American history. He even meets with an expert on the preparation and consumption of human placenta (and, yes, it goes well with Chianti). Bringing together the latest cutting-edge science, Schutt answers questions such as why some amphibians consume their mother's skin; why certain insects bite the heads off their partners after sex; why, up until the end of the twentieth century, Europeans regularly ate human body parts as medical curatives; and how cannibalism might be linked to the extinction of the Neanderthals. He takes us into the future as well, investigating whether, as climate change causes famine, disease, and overcrowding, we may see more outbreaks of cannibalism in many more species--including our own.Cannibalism places a perfectly natural occurrence into a vital new context and invites us to explore why it both enthralls and repels us.

    It's weirder than we are capable of imagining. And we're all in it together: humans, blue whales, rats, birds of paradise, ridiculous numbers of beetles, molluscs the size of a bus, the sexual gladiators of slugs, bdelliod rotifers who haven't had sex for millions of years and creatures called water bears: you can boil them, freeze them and fire them off into space without killing themWe're all part of the animal kingdom, appearing in what Darwin called 'endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful'. In this breathtakingly audacious book Simon Barnes has brought us all together, seeking not what separates us but what unites us. He takes us white-water rafting through the entire animal kingdom in a book that brings in deep layers of arcane knowledge, the works of Darwin and James Joyce, Barnes's own don't-try-this-at-home adventures in the wild, David Attenborough and Sherlock Holmes.

    Current estimates suggest that the rate of extinction is now thousands of times that counted in the fossil record before the emergence of modern man. At the same time, human societies themselves are in a cultural extinction crisis, with experts anticipating that of the world's nearly seven thousand languages as few as ten percent may survive into the next century. Melanie Challenger's extraordinary book is an exploration of how we might live to resist these extinctions and why such disappearances must be of concern to us. Adventurous, curious and passionate about her subject, Challenger takes us on a very personal journey as she tries to restore her own relationship with nature. The narrative unfolds through a series of landscapes haunted by extinction. From the ruined tin mines of Cornwall and the abandoned whaling stations of South Georgia to the Inuit camps of the Arctic and the white heart of Antarctica, she probes the critical relationship between human activities and environmental collapse. This is the first book to weave together the strands of cultural, biological and industrial extinctions into a meditation on the way we live beside nature in the modern world.

    In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar uses groundbreaking experiments that have forever changed the way evolutionary biologists explain how the distant past underpins our current ­behavior.We know so much more now than Darwin ever did, but the core of modern evolutionary theory lies firmly in Darwin’s elegantly simple idea: organisms behave in ways that enhance the frequency with which genes are passed on to future generations. This idea is at the heart of Dunbar’s book, which seeks to explain why humans behave as they do. Stimulating, provocative, and immensely enjoyable, his book invites you to explore the number of friends you have, whether you have your father’s brain or your mother’s, whether morning sickness might actually be good for you, why Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was a foregone conclusion, what Gaelic has to do with frankincense, and why we laugh. In the process, Dunbar examines the role of religion in human evolution, the fact that most of us have unexpectedly famous ancestors, and why men and women never seem able to see eye to eye on color.

    In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

    Written for both the casual reader and the science buff hungry for new information, The Vision Revolution is a resource that dispels commonly believed perceptions about sight and offers answers drawn from the field’s most recent research.Changizi focuses on four “why” questions:1. Why do we see in color?2. Why do our eyes face forward?3. Why do we see illusions?4. Why does reading come so naturally to us?Why Do We See in Color?It was commonly believed that color vision evolved to help our primitive ancestors identify ripe fruit. Changizi says we should look closer to home: ourselves. Human color vision evolved to give us greater insights into the mental states and health of other people. People who can see color changes in skin have an advantage over their color-blind counterparts; they can see when people are blushing with embarrassment, purple-faced with exertion or the reddening of rashes. Changizi’s research reveals that the cones in our eyes that allow us to see color are exquisitely designed exactly for seeing color changes in the skin. And it’s no coincidence that the primates with color vision are the ones with bare spots on their faces and other body parts; Changizi shows that the development of color vision in higher primates closely parallels the loss of facial hair, culminating in the near hairlessness and highly developed color vision of humans.Why Do Our Eyes Face Forward?Forward-facing eyes set us apart from most mammals, and there is much dispute as to why we have them. While some speculate that we evolved this feature to give us depth perception available through stereo vision, this type of vision only allows us to see short distances, and we already have other mechanisms that help us to estimate distance. Changizi’s research shows that with two forward-facing eyes, primates and humans have an x-ray ability. Specifically, we’re able to see through the cluttered leaves of the forest environment in which we evolved. This feature helps primates see their targets in a crowded, encroached environment. To see how this works, hold a finger in front of your eyes. You’ll find that you’re able to look “through” it, at what is beyond your finger. One of the most amazing feats of two forward-facing eyes? Our views aren’t blocked by our noses, beaks, etc.Why Do We See Illusions?We evolved to see moving objects, not where they are, but where they are going to be. Without this ability, we couldn’t catch a ball because the brain’s ability to process visual information isn’t fast enough to allow us to put our hands in the right place to intersect for a rapidly approaching baseball. “If our brains simply created a perception of the way the world was at the time light hit the eye, then by the time that perception was elicited—which takes about a tenth of a second for the brain to do—time would have marched on, and the perception would be of the recent past,” Changizi explains. Simply put, illusions occur when our brain is tricked into thinking that a stationary two-dimensional picture has an element that is moving. Our brains project the “moving” element into the future and, as a result, we don’t see what’s on the page, but what our brain thinks will be the case a fraction of a second into the future.Why Does Reading Come So Naturally to Us?We can read faster than we can hear, which is odd, considering that reading is relatively recent, and we’ve evolved to process speech for millions of years. Changizi’s research reveals that language has been carefully designed to tap in to elements of the visual processing center that have evolved for tens of millions of years. Visual signs of all languages are shaped like objects in nature, Changizi says, because we have evolved to see nature easily. “People have noticed letters in nature for some time, and there are artists who have a spent a lot of time photographing Latin letters in natural scenes or on butterfly wings,” Changizi says. “For example, if you look at an upper corner of the room you are in, you will see three contours meeting at a point, making a shape close to that of a ‘Y.’“ The Vision Revolution expands upon how our ancestors found the shapes of Latin letters and delves into how visual signs can have similar shapes even though their inspirations come from very different environments.In addition to these four areas, The Vision Revolution explores other phenomena such as cyclopses, peeking and many more you hadn’t even thought to wonder about. Changizi shows how deeply involved these evolutionary aspects of our vision are in why we see the way we do—and what the future holds for us.“…to understand how culture interacts with vision, one must understand not just the eye’s design, but the actual mechanisms we have evolved,” Changizi says, “for culture can tap in to both the designed responses of our brains and the unintended responses.”The Vision Revolution is a book that finally gives attention to what before has been largely neglected by other works on human vision—a book that looks at the “why.”