Curious Bones

Recounts the life and work of Mary Anning, who collected fossils throughout her life and made major discoveries in paleontology when that branch of science was first emerging.

An unconventional, engaging, and delightful counting book for curious minds that playfully uses numbers as an entry-point to discover the amazing, diverse, fact-filled world of wonders all around us. The book focuses on the numbers zero to nine and powers of ten counterparts of ten to nine billion. Richly imagined and playfully illustrated, Octopuses Have Zero Bones is a great choice for children, families, inquisitive people of all ages, and it is a strong addition to any classroom or school library. Do you know… How many bones an octopus has? How many breaths you take a day? How many times a black bear’s heart beats each hour? How many moons Mars has? How many miles a trip to the moon and back is? How about a trip to Saturn? How many leaves are on an oak tree? How many meters there are between you and the clouds? What happens when you keep placing zeroes at the end of numbers? The answers to these questions appear in this book—along with many more amazing facts that celebrate the numbers zero to nine and powers of ten numbers ten to nine billion. Starting with zero instead of one, this whimsical, fact-filled counting book will delight readers of all ages. Combining elements of traditional and advanced counting books with a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world around us, Octopuses Have Zero Bones encourages young readers to fall in love with numbers and the world around them. The book’s layered content offers an easy and attractive point of entry as well as the possible to explore and understand more at multiple levels.

When ochre-stained bones were unearthed by William Buckland in a Welsh cave in 1823, they raised many unsettling questions regarding their origin, and inspired the casting and recasting of the character who became known as the Red Lady. Her biography reflects the personal, professional, and national ambitions of those who studied her.

How can you know a place? Historian and naturalist Jack Nisbet&—author of Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America&—looks to the relics of a region to connect the present moment to the distant past. In the vast Western territory defined by the Columbia River, Nisbet tracks the stories and meaning of relics such as a trilobite fossil that points to a tropical prehistoric ecology; the nearly extinct California condor, once the largest thing in the skies, described with amazement by Meriwether Lewis; the indelible stain of the smallpox pandemic that overcame the native peoples of the West; a rare and socially potent strain of indigenous wild tobacco that reveals the presence of vestigial Indian practices; and the remains of one Jaco Finlay, a mixed-blood trapper and scout who seems to have been everywhere in the region two hundred years ago. All of these relics are the visible bones that show how past is present in the Columbia River Country. Together the stories these bones tell lays out a wholly original, hybrid history that connects nature with human endeavor, geography with the passage of time&—all contribute to the biography of a place. The arrow of time travels in one direction, and this is usually how history is told: beginning to end. But Jack Nisbet is up to something else: journeys across time through a place, knitting past to present and back again to assemble a portrait of the land that marked the culmination of Lewis & Clark’s expedition, that saw the sad end of the Indian Wars with the flight of Chief Joseph, that has offered up fossil proof of mammoth species long extinct. In this western territory, the storied past is much in evidence.

Written over five decades, these poems begin fixed in the human condition, our common experience of an imperfect world. Slowly, under the aegis of the Spirit, they move toward a brighter vision of things: they ask us to dream in that fecund darkness until all shapes are shining. Poetry offers us an experience of union with the alarming and enthralling world we live in, as well as glimpses of what transcends it and is beyond language. It reminds us that all is connected and supports the hope that light will triumph. The author trusts that these poems may do the same as they explore the chain of being from animal to human, from serpent to angel--and that joy is the final dominant note.

Jake McGowan-Lowe is a boy with a very unusual hobby. Since the age of 7, he has been photographing and blogging about his incredible finds and now has a worldwide following, including 100,000 visitors from the US and Canada. Follow Jake as he explores the animal world through this new 64-page book. He takes you on a world wide journey of his own collection, and introduces you to other amazing animals from the four corners of the globe. Find out what a cow's tooth, a rabbit's rib and a duck's quack look like and much, much more besides.