Animal Science

When Mona the Mouse stumbles across the wondrous world of the Heartwood Hotel in the middle of a storm, she desperately hopes they'll let her stay. As it turns out, Mona is precisely the maid they need at the grandest hotel in Fernwood Forest, where animals come from far and wide for safety, luxury, and comfort. But the Heartwood Hotel is not all acorn souffles and soft moss-lined beds. Danger lurks, and as it approaches, Mona finds that this hotel is more than a warm place to spend the night. It might also be a home.

Effective altruism is built upon the simple, but profound, idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the "most good you can do". Such a life requires an unsentimental view of charitable giving: To be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas and shows how living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment.

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes.

In their New York Times best-selling book The Genius of Dogs, husband-and-wife team Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods lay out landmark discoveries from the Duke Canine Cognition Center and other research facilities around the world to reveal how your dog thinks and how we humans can have even deeper relationships with our best four-legged friends.

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species—or as many could fit on Noah’s Ark?

The complete series of page-turning adventures! Molly (10 years old) and Michael (12 years old) are a pair of plucky Australian kids who find themselves in Papua New Guinea. Both passionate about science and nature, they put their super smart minds together and discover things that even the adults don't know about. From contaminated lakes to dinosaurs living inside volcanoes, and a strange research facility in the middle of the jungle, there seems to be no end to the mysteries they encounter. Slinking between the trees, soaring through the sky on a magical bird, and riding the mycelium ...

When we see a bird flying from branch to branch happily chirping, it is easy to imagine they lead a simple life of freedom, flight, and feathers. What we don't see is the arduous, life-threatening challenges they face at every moment. Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs guides the listener through the myriad, and often almost miraculous, things that birds do every day to merely stay alive. Like the goldfinch, which manages extreme weather changes by doubling the density of its plumage in winter.

A couple working six months per year for 50 hours per week on 20 acres can net $25,000 to $30,000 per year with an investment equivalent to the price of one new medium-sized tractor. Seldom has agriculture held out such a plum. In a day when mainline farm experts predict the continued demise of the family farm, the pastured poultry opportunity shines like a beacon in the night, guiding the way to a brighter future.

For hundreds of years, humans and animals have had special bonds with each other. We've lived side-by-side through thick and thin - these relationships are not just about raising pets and farm animals. In Animal Kind, Emma Lock of YouTube fame shares stories of the incredible ways that animals keep us healthy and happy, physically and mentally. You'll be inspired by the tales of remarkable recovery, from vision-impaired individuals who have gained independence with the help of seeing-eye dogs, to the woman who found new life as an equestrian champion after an arm amputation.

As shadows of the past continue to plague the forest, Brambleclaw is haunted by a dark figure on a dangerous quest for revenge and must struggle to remain true to his Clan. A sinister path is unfolding, and the time is coming for certain warriors to make the choices that will determine their destinies...and the destiny of all the Clans.

A quarter of a century after her memoir, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin—the “anthropologist from Mars,” as Oliver Sacks dubbed her—transforms our awareness of the different ways our brains are wired. Do you have a keen sense of direction, a love of puzzles, the ability to assemble IKEA furniture without crying? You are likely a visual thinker.

Bears have always held a central place in our collective memory, from Indigenous folklore and Greek mythology to nineteenth-century fairytales and the modern toy shop. But as humans and bears come into ever-closer contact, our relationship nears a tipping point. Today, most of the eight remaining bear species are threatened with extinction. Some, such as the panda bear and the polar bear, are icons of the natural world; others, such as the spectacled bear and the sloth bear, are far less known.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an arduous and even deadly ritual called a “lek.” To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. When achieved, consummation with a female takes seconds.

In this adventure that has delighted children for years, Elmer Elevator sets out to free a baby dragon who has been captured by the animals of Wild Island.

The sixth book in the Dawn of the Clans series takes listeners back to the earliest days of the Clans, when the cats first settled in the forest and began to forge the warrior code. After moons of strife, the forest cats have settled into five camps. But now, the dangerous rogue Slash has kidnapped Clear Sky's mate, Star Flower, and made demands for prey that the cats cannot afford to meet. Desperate to save Star Flower, Clear Sky must convince the other groups - led by Tall Shadow, Wind Runner, Thunder, and River Ripple - to join forces, or their new way of life may not survive.

Can a robot survive in the wilderness? When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is - but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a violent storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island's unwelcoming animal inhabitants. As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home - until, one day, the robot's mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

When one of the time-traveling crew is running for student-body president at Manchester Middle School, Rush Revere takes them back in history to witness the election and leadership of our first three presidents.

"A remarkably amusing and insightful novella." - Ryan Hyatt, author of the Terrafide cyberpunk series Robert Lopez invented technology to change the world, not destroy it. Starting a philosophical debate with his “braintroller” that allows animals to speak to each other and us, Robert inadvertently helps humankind stumble headlong into the apocalypse. In a near-future miasma of poor decision-making and economic principles gone awry, Robert must navigate the dystopian world he helped create while searching for safety, and maybe, if he’s lucky, redemption too. If you like to laugh at ...

Zoey discovers a glowing photo and learns an amazing secret. Injured magical animals come to their backyard barn for help. When a sick baby dragon appears, it’s up to Zoey and Sassafras to figure out what’s wrong. Will they be able to help little Marshmallow before it’s too late?