Sea scorpions were the biggest arthropods to ever exist. The biggest grew over 8 feet long! In this hi/lo title, readers will discover the lives of sea scorpions as they swam through prehistoric oceans. Leveled text and colorful illustrations show off sea scorpions’ body parts, favorite foods, behaviors, and extinction. Special features map the prehistoric world, show off the animals’ size, call out favorite foods, and highlight an important fossil discovery. The book closes with a full-spread profile that puts important information about sea scorpions in one place!

Sea scorpions were the biggest arthropods to ever exist. The biggest grew over 8 feet long! In this hi/lo title, readers will discover the lives of sea scorpions as they swam through prehistoric oceans. Leveled text and colorful illustrations show off sea scorpions’ body parts, favorite foods, behaviors, and extinction. Special features map the prehistoric world, show off the animals’ size, call out favorite foods, and highlight an important fossil discovery. The book closes with a full-spread profile that puts important information about sea scorpions in one place!

Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems describes the role of sperm competition in selection on a range of attributes from gamete morphology to species mating systems. This book is organized into 19 chapters and begins with the conceptualization of sperm competition as a subset of sexual selection and its implications for the insects. The following chapter describes the relationship between multiple mating and female fitness, with an emphasis on determining the conditions under which selection on females is likely to counteract selection on males for avoiding sperm competition. Other chapters consider the female perspective on sperm competition; the evolutionary causation at the level of the individual male gamete; and the correlation of high paternal investment and sperm precedence in the insects. The remaining chapters are arranged phylogenetically and explore the sperm competition in diverse animal taxa, such as the Drosophila, Lepidoptera, spiders, amphibians, and reptiles. These chapters also cover the evolution of direct versus indirect sperm transfer among the arachnids or the problem for kinship theory presented by multiple mating and sperm competition in the Hymenoptera. This book further discusses the remarkable potential for sperm competition among certain temperate bat species whose females store sperm through winter hibernation and the mixed strategies and male-caused female genital trauma as possible sperm competition adaptations in poeciliid fishes. The concluding chapter examines the predictions concerning testes size and mating systems in the primates and the possible role of sperm competition in human selection. This book is of great value to reproductive biologists and researchers.

Color artwork and detailed captions journey underwater to capture the prehistoric world of an array of extinct animals, in the companion volume to the Discovery Channel special

A renowned biologist provides a sweeping chronicle of more than four billion years of life on Earth, shedding new light on evolutionary theory and history, sexual selection, speciation, extinction, and genetics.

A “superbly written, richly illustrated” guide to the animals who lived 450 million years ago—in the fossil-rich area where Cincinnati, Ohio now stands (Rocks & Minerals). The region around Cincinnati, Ohio, is known throughout the world for the abundant and beautiful fossils found in limestones and shales that were deposited as sediments on the sea floor during the Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago—some 250 million years before the dinosaurs lived. In Ordovician time, the shallow sea that covered much of what is now the North American continent teemed with marine life. The Cincinnati area has yielded some of the world’s most abundant and best-preserved fossils of invertebrate animals such as trilobites, bryozoans, brachiopods, molluscs, echinoderms, and graptolites. So famous are the Ordovician fossils and rocks of the Cincinnati region that geologists use the term “Cincinnatian” for strata of the same age all over North America. This book synthesizes more than 150 years of research on this fossil treasure-trove, describing and illustrating the fossils, the life habits of the animals represented, their communities, and living relatives, as well as the nature of the rock strata in which they are found and the environmental conditions of the ancient sea. “A fascinating glimpse of a long-extinct ecosystem.” —Choice