Marvelous colors and spectacular patterns of real and fanciful fish abound in this eye-catching collection. Reproduced from illustrations in a rare 18th-century volume on natural history, the 261 royalty-free designs are ideal for use by illustrators and commercial artists and can be used as well in craft projects and classroom activities.

The natural world in all its richness, glimpsed variously in the house, the barnyard, and the garden, in ponds and streams, and at large in the woods and the fields, including old friends like the dog, the cat, the cow, and the pig, along with more unusual and sometimes alarming characters such as the weasel, the dragonfly, snakes of several sorts, and even a whale, not to mention ants in their seeming infinitude and a single humble potato—all these and more are the subjects of what may well be the most deft and delightful book of literary miniatures ever written. In Jules Renard’s world, plants and animals not only feel but speak (one species, the swallow, appears to write Hebrew), and yet, for all the anthropomorphic wit and whimsy the author indulges in, they guard their mystery too. Sly, funny, and touching, Nature Stories, here beautifully rendered into English by Douglas Parmée and accompanied by the wonderful ink-brush images of Pierre Bonnard with which the book was originally published, is a literary classic of inexhaustible freshness.

Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

The authoritative expert's guide to fascinating frogfishes and their unusual lives. Winner of the PROSE Award for Best Single Volume Reference in Science by the Association of American Publishers Unique among the world's fishes, frogfishes display a bizarre combination of attributes and behaviors that make them a subject of fervent study. Through cunning and trickery, they turn would-be predators into prey; they "walk" across the ocean floor and jet-propel through open water; some lay their eggs in a floating mucoid mass, while others employ complex patterns of parental care; and they are certainly among the most colorful of nature's productions. In Frogfishes, two of the world's leading anglerfish experts, Theodore W. Pietsch and Rachel J. Arnold, bring together an enormous amount of information about these incredible creatures. The only detailed exploration of frogfishes in print, the book touches on everything from their morphology and biomechanics to their diets and habitats. Enhanced with more than 500 spectacular color images, the book also includes • a thorough look at about 5,000 preserved specimens; • an annotated synonymy for all extant taxa, as well as keys and tables to facilitate identification; • insights into frogfish feeding, locomotion, mimicry, and reproductive behavior; • descriptions of recent scientific advances, including the discovery of new species, shifts in geographic distribution, and emerging DNA sequencing techniques; and • tips for frogfish-seeking divers and aquarists that emphasize conservation. Unmasking the mysteries of frogfish evolution and phylogenetic relationships through close examination of their fossil record, morphology, and molecular reconstruction, Frogfishes demonstrates the surprising diversity and beauty of this remarkable assemblage of marine shorefishes.