The Dodos Did It

A brilliantly funny story about dodos, a dinosaur, and being VERY careful what you wish for, from the creator of Nine Lives Newton. Jack doesn’t just like dodos, he LOVES them. So when his dearest wish for a pet dodo comes true, surely Jack will be the happiest he’s ever been, EVER. Unless, of course, Jack wishes for more and more dodos and his new pets cause complete chaos, and no one believes that the dodos did it because dodos don’t exist and everyone blames Jack for everything. Maybe it's time for Jack to think about wishing for something completely different . . .

From the first dog to the first beefalo, from farming to CRISPR, the human history of remaking nature When the 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded to the inventors of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, it underlined our amazing and apparently novel powers to alter nature. But as biologist Beth Shapiro argues in Life as We Made It, this phenomenon isn’t new. Humans have been reshaping the world around us for ages, from early dogs to modern bacteria modified to pump out insulin. Indeed, she claims, reshaping nature—resetting the course of evolution, ours and others’—is the essence of what our species does. In exploring our evolutionary and cultural history, Shapiro finds a course for the future. If we have always been changing nature to help us survive and thrive, then we need to avoid naive arguments about how we might destroy it with our meddling, and instead ask how we can meddle better. Brilliant and insightful, Life as We Made It is an essential book for the decades to come.

Why have island ecosystems always suffered such high rates of extinction? In our age, with all the world's landscapes, from Tasmania to the Amazon to Yellowstone, now being carved into island-like fragments by human activity, the implications of this question are more urgent than ever. Over the past eight years, David Quammen has followed the threads of island biogeography on a globe-encircling journey of discovery.

Dodos are extinct, right? WRONG! They're not! They're just in disguise, and they're not the only ones. This book reveals the secrets of the woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and even dinosaurs! These famous creatures are in disguise everywhere, so keep your eyes peeled! You never know who might be right under your nose ... From author-illustrator Paddy Donnelly comes a hilarious story that will keep kids giggling and guessing on every page.

One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

For this edited volume, the editors solicited chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our "brute roots." In other words, this book investigates themes that enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. The present book is unique in its focus on the call for nonanthropocentrism in rhetorical studies. Although there have been many hints in recent years that rhetoric is beginning to consider the implications of the animal turn, as yet no other anthology makes this its explicit starting point and sustained objective. Thus, the various contributions to this book promise to further the ongoing debate about what rhetoric might be after it sheds its long-standing humanistic bias.

The Mascarene islands in the southern Indian Ocean - Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues - were once home to an extraordinary range of birds and reptiles. Evolving on these isolated volcanic islands in the absence of mammalian predators or competitors, the land was dominated by giant tortoises, parrots, skinks and geckos, burrowing boas, flightless rails & herons, and of course (in Mauritius) the Dodo. Uninhabited and only discovered in the 1500s, colonisation by European settlers in the 1600s led to dramatic changes in the ecology of the islands; the birds and tortoises were slaughtered indiscriminately while introduced rats, cats, pigs and monkeys destroyed their eggs, the once-extensive forests logged, and invasive introduced plants from all over the tropics devastated the ecosystem. The now-familiar icon of extinction, the Dodo, was gone from Mauritius within 50 years of human settlement, and over the next 150 years many of the Mascarenes' other native vertebrates followed suit. The product of over 30 years research by Anthony Cheke, Lost Land of the Dodo provides a comprehensive yet hugely enjoyable account of the story of the islands' changing ecology, interspersed with human stories, the islands' biogeographical anomalies, and much else. Many French publications, old and new, especially for Réunion, are discussed and referenced in English for the first time. The book is richly illustrated with maps and contemporary illustrations of the animals and their environment, many of which have rarely been reprinted before. Illustrated box texts look in detail at each extinct vertebrate species, while Julian Hume's superb colour plates bring many of the extinct birds to life. Lost Land of the Dodo provides the definitive account of this tragic yet remarkable fauna, and is a must-read for anyone interested in islands, their ecology and the history of our relationship with the world around us.

In The Mountain People, Colin M. Turnbull describes the dehumanization of the Ik, African tribesmen who in less than three generations have deteriorated from being once-prosperous hunters to scattered bands of hostile, starving people whose only goal is individual survival. Sad, disturbing, and eloquently written, The Mountain People is a moving meditation on human nature, our capacity for goodness, and the fragility of human society.