You've probably heard that dolphins communicate in a rich language of their own and that elephants display emotional bonds.  But Virginia Morrell's engaging new book offers some real surprises from the field of animal intelligence: creative ants, suffering fish, and the astonishing capacity of some bird brains. 

The enthusiasm Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, feels for visible, tangible signs of Earth's prehistoric past is irresistibly infectious. Combining lively first-person narrative with his own breathtakingly beautiful photographs, the author reveals the holdovers from a lost world (from horseshoe crab to horsetail ferns) that can be found across the globe or right in our own backyards.

America's long fascination with the Everglades, a twisted chronicle of preservation and exploitation, is recounted here in perspiration-inducing detail by Laura A. Ogden, an anthropologist intimate with the welands' iconic nooks and crannies. Bringing alive the complex interactions of animals, people, geology, and government, this book serves as a corrective to common myths concerning the exotic tropical ecosystem.

Just what its subtitle advertises: a leaf-by-leaf guide to six hundred of the world's great trees. From alder to ash, birch to beech, maple to oak, and scores more both familiar and exotic, Allen J. Coombes's illustrated guide helps us indentify and appreciate the character and variety of nature's leafy wonder.

A delightfully ingenious scientific, literary, and philosophical meditation on the most majestic and ephemeral of natural wonders, by the great 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Read more...