In his second collection of works, Edward Fisher is at his rhapsodic best again, full of rhythmic surprise and lyrical freshness as he wrestles with the intermingling mysteries of love and death. Ordinary experience becomes a gateway to revelation through the miracle and adventure of the senses in a celebration of the natural world. The merry-go-round of the planet, dancing with animals, revolves in a circle of self-discovery, eternal renewal and metamorphosis. This festive air of child-like wonder and simple joy is set against the backdrop of the passing seasons and a sense of personal loss, plumbing the darker side of suffering that deepens our humanity and compassion. At once both testament and meditation, hymn and psalm, Fisher explores the universality of sacred stories, reconciling the scientific world-view with religious symbol and myth, and finding meaning in the guiding hand of love through the geography of longing and lament.

Much of Charles Darwin's groundbreaking work as an evolutionary biologist stemmed from his study of birds. It is universally acknowledged that Darwin's observation of bird groups and species like the Galapagos finches, mockingbirds, and rock doves was critical to the development of his theories on natural selection, evolution, and sexual selection. The significant number of diverse birds that Darwin covered in his published works represents a most substantial ornithological contribution. His major books alone contain reference to and consideration of almost 500 bird species, as well as interesting and pertinent discussion of over 100 ornithological topics. "Charles Darwin's Birds" is a comprehensive treatment of Darwin's work as an ornithologist. Clifford Frith discusses every ornithological topic and bird species that Darwin researched, providing a complete historical survey of his published writing on birds. Through this, we learn how Darwin became an increasingly skilled and eventually exceptional ornithologist, and how his relationships grew with contemporary scientists like John Gould. It examines how Darwin was influenced by birds, and how the major themes of his research developed through his study of them. The book also features 4 appendices, which contain brief accounts of every bird species Darwin wrote about, basic ornithological information about each of the species, and a listing of where the species appears in Darwin's work.

Darwin made a powerful argument for evolution in the Origin of Species, based on all the evidence available to him. But a few things puzzled him. One was how inheritance works - he did not know about genes. This book concerns another of Darwin's Dilemmas, and the efforts of modern palaeontologists to solve it. What puzzled Darwin is that the most very ancient rocks, before the Cambrian, seemed to be barren, when he would expect them to be teeming with life. Darwin speculated that this was probably because the fossils had not been found yet. Decades of work by modern palaeontologists have indeed brought us amazing fossils from far beyond the Cambrian, from the depths of the Precambrian, so life was certainly around. Yet the fossils are enigmatic, and something does seem to happen around the Cambrian to speed up evolution drastically and produce many of the early forms of animals we know today. In this book, Martin Brasier, a leading palaeontologist working on early life, takes us into the deep, dark ages of the Precambrian to explore Darwin's Lost World. Decoding the evidence in these ancient rocks, piecing together the puzzle of what happened over 540 million years ago to drive what is known as the Cambrian Explosion, is very difficult. The world was vastly different then from the one we know now, and we are in terrain with few familiar landmarks. Brasier is a master storyteller, and combines the account of what we now know of the strange creatures of these ancient times with engaging and amusing anecdotes from his expeditions to Siberia, Outer Mongolia, Barbuda, and other places, giving a vivid impression of the people, places, and challenges involved in such work. He ends by presenting his own take on the Cambrian Explosion, based on the picture emerging from this very active field of research. A vital clue involves worms - burrowing worms are one of the key signs of the start of the Cambrian. This is fitting: Darwin was inordinately fond of worms.

In this first-ever examination of Charles Darwin's sketches, drawings, and illustrations, Julia Voss presents the history of evolutionary theory told in pictures. Darwin had a life-long interest in pictorial representations of nature, sketching out his evolutionary theory and related ideas for over forty years. Voss details the pictorial history of Darwin's theory of evolution, starting with his notebook sketches of 1837 and ending with the illustrations in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). These images were profoundly significant for Darwin's long-term argument for evolutionary theory; each characterizes a different aspect of his relationship with the visual information and constitutes what can be called an “icon' of evolution. Voss shows how Darwin “thought with his eyes' and how his pictorial representations and the development and popularization of the theory of evolution were vitally interconnected. Voss explores four of Darwin's images in depth, and weaves about them a story on the development and presentation of Darwin's theory, in which she also addresses the history of Victorian illustration, the role of images in science, the technologies of production, and the relationship between specimen, words, and images.

Tyrannosaurus rex is everyone’s favorite dinosaur, and in death it plays a central role in this book. But this work is about the voyage through college by eleven students, including their adventures out West with an inspirational Professor Goodspeed, nicknamed “Speedy.” Dubbing themselves “The Mélange,” a group of friends discover a T. rex skull that was stolen, triggering a scandal of international proportions. A mini-reunion for the Mélange is arranged, hoping that a fracas prior to graduation that scattered them will have faded from memories. It has, and the event is a great success. We learn about the Mélangers’ lives since graduation, and there are some surprises. T. rex, Darwin, and Adventures Out West includes aspects of science accessible to nonscientists, sprinkled with fascinating aspects of natural science in order to educate the reader about earth history and evolution. In the process, readers learn how to defend evolution against creationists. About the Author Steven M. Stanley is a paleontologist with an A.B. from Princeton, summa cum laude, and a Ph.D. from Yale. He was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins for many years and the University of Hawaii for a few. He is now a part-time research professor at Florida State University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. Steven has written textbooks and trade books about science. His The New Evolutionary Timetable was nominated for the American Book Award. In an L. A. Times review of his book, Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve, Douglas Preston wrote, “Not since the making of the Atomic Bomb have I been so captivated by a nonfiction book.” Steven has recently been featured in The Wall Street Journal as a professor and author. He’s been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and has received many medals and other honors. During the past thirty years, Steven has been the only paleontologist to have received the Penrose Medal, the Geological Society of America’s highest award, "for eminence in pure research." He’s also an amateur landscape architect, building patios and planting trees, shrubs, and perennials, and he has a wonderful daughter, adopted in Russia.

The year is 10,515 AD. The Hyades Armada, traveling at near lightspeed, will reach Earth in just four centuries to assess humanity's value as slaves. For the last 8,000 years, two opposing factions have labored to meet the alien threat in very different ways. One of them is Ximen del Azarchel, immortal leader of the mutineers from the starship Hermetic and self-appointed Master of the World, who has allowed his followers to tamper continuously with the evolutionary destiny of Man, creating one bizarre race after another in an apparent search for a species the Hyades will find worthy of conquest. The other is Menelaus Montrose, the posthuman Judge of Ages, whose cryonic Tombs beneath the surface of Earth have preserved survivors from each epoch created by the Hermeticists. Montrose intends to thwart the alien invaders any way he can, and to remain alive long enough to be reunited with his bride Rania, who is on a seventy-millennia journey to confront the Hyades' masters, tens of thousands of light-years away. Now, with the countdown to the Hyades' arrival nearing its end, del Azarchel and Montrose square off for what is to be their final showdown for the fate of Earth, a battle of gunfire and cliometric calculus; powered armor and posthuman intelligence. Judge of Ages is the wildly inventive third volume in a series exploring future history and human evolution from John C. Wright. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.