Results by title

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves. 

Volume IIB of East African Mammals is a study of some of  East Africa's smallest and least conspicuous mammals, hares and rodents.

In each volume Kingdon combines his text with hundreds of finished drawings and quick sketches, the latter a form of field note that provides an incomparable description of the animal's movements and personality. Kingdom explains his drawings "as a wordless questioning of form. . . . The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens." As an artist, Kingdon's achievement has been compared with Audubon's; as a scientist, his work has made these volumes indispensable to any serious student of East African mammals.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves.

Volume IIIA documents the carnivores of East Africa—lions, cheetahs, jackals, otters, civets, genets, mongooses, hyenas, and such lesser-known species as the zorilla and the aardwolf.

The beauty of the animals, so vivid in these incomparable drawings, is made more poignant by the acknowledgment of their increasingly endangered status. Kingdon discusses the inevitable problems posed by large mammal communities in a developing continent and includes numerous maps indicating their declining ranges and populations.

Acclaimed and coveted by both naturalists and lovers of wildlife illustration, Jonathan Kingdon's seven-volume East African Mammals has become a classic of modern natural history. This paperback edition makes Kingdon's remarkable artistic and scientific achievement—his hundreds of drawings and perceptive study of all the mammals in East Africa's species-rich fauna—available to the wide audience it deserves.

Volume IIIB celebrates the large mammals for which the African plains are so famous—elephants, rhinos, zebras, bushpigs, and warthogs, hippopotamuses, camels, chevrotains, giraffes. Kingdon brings his artist's eye to such puzzles as the zebra's stripes and the giraffe's spots, making original observations throughout the seven volumes about the evolutionary and functional significance of coat color, facial expressions, and curious forms and markings.

The beauty of the animals, so vivid in these incomparable drawings, is made more poignant by the acknowledgment of their increasingly endangered status. Kingdon discusses the inevitable problems posed by large mammal communities in a developing continent and includes numerous maps indicating their declining ranges and populations.

Kingdon's remarkable seven-volume masterwork on East African mammals concludes with two volumes on the bovids, placing them in a broad comparative, ecological, and evolutionary context. Volume IIIC covers cattle, water buffalo, kudus, elands, dwarf antelopes, duikers, reedbucks, and waterbucks; IIID covers gazelles, impalas, wildebeests, oryxes, sheep, and goats. In addition to the stunning, lifelike drawings that are an integral part of the text, the volumes include a reappraisal of bovid taxonomy and original analyses of the form and function of body shape and size, horn shape, coat pattern, and tooth structure.