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Including more than four hundred species from all seven recognized biological families, a beautiful visual celebration of bee species the world over. 

The honeycombs, hives, dancing, and royalty of bee colonies have long captured the public’s imagination, but there’s far more to these insects. There are over 20,000 bee species, but only a handful have colonies approaching the organization of the familiar western honeybee. The typical bee, if there is one, is solitary. It nests in the ground or a stem and has seven to fifteen offspring that develop and emerge the following year, long after their mother has died. These solitary species vary tremendously in the flowers they visit, how they collect pollen and nectar, the architecture of their nests, and how males strategize to find mates. Furthermore, another 17% of all bee species are well-armored parasites, often with striking colors and an array of tactics for attacking other bees.

Bees’ keystone contribution, as pollinators, to the human food supply and to the proper function of ecosystems far exceeds their numbers. From the emerald-green dilemma orchid bee to the spined leafcutter cuckoo, The Book of Bees celebrates bee species worldwide, highlighting a broad range of their diversity to illustrate how different they are in behavior, life history, and interactions with flowers and humans. Each entry includes a distribution map, a table of essential information, a section on related species, and a description of the species’ importance in terms of taxonomy, rarity, behavior, and scientific significance. Striking photos show the bees at their actual size and are also enlarged to showcase intricate details.

This wide-ranging exploration of social, solitary, and parasitic bees offers fascinating insights into their remarkable lives, fostering greater appreciation of their ecological importance and the need for their conservation.

An up-to-date, exquisitely illustrated guide to six hundred of the world’s beguiling beetles.

When renowned British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane was asked what could be inferred about God from a study of his works, Haldane replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.” With more than 440,000 known species, and scientific estimates that millions more have yet to be identified, their abundance is indisputable, as is their variety. They range from the delightful summer firefly to the one-hundred-gram Goliath beetle. Beetles offer a dazzling array of shapes, sizes, and colors that entice scientists and collectors across the globe.

In a new updated edition, The Book of Beetles celebrates the beauty and diversity of this marvelous group of insects. The book includes six hundred significant beetle species, and each entry features a distribution map, basic biology, feeding habits, and information on cultural and economic significance. The beetles appear both at their actual size and enlarged to show details, such as the sextet of spots that distinguish the six-spotted tiger beetle or the jagged ridges of the mandibles on the giant jawed sawyer beetle. With updates to the common names, distribution, classification, or photographs for nearly five hundred entries, this edition offers the latest science and accessibly written, descriptive text that will appeal to researchers and armchair coleopterists alike.

The humble beetle continues to grow in popularity, taking center stage in biodiversity studies, sustainable agriculture programs, and even the dining rooms of adventurous and eco-conscious chefs. The Book of Beetles is the authoritative reference on these remarkably adaptable and beautiful creatures.

For all dog lovers, a stunningly illustrated and scientifically informed global guide to our beloved canine companions and their wild kin.

Dogs are spectacularly diverse. From the world’s smallest wild canid, the diminutive fennec fox, to the majestic grey wolf, and from the towering great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua, The Book of Dogs celebrates the connections between humans’ best friends, their ancestors, and their wild cousins, offering insights into both wild and domestic canines and profiling every related species in the dog family Canidae as well as the vast variety of domestic dog breeds.

No other book so comprehensively and globally covers the most widespread family of carnivore species, helping to show that humans’ companions are part of a much larger animal world. Leading canid expert and award-winning author David W. Macdonald accessibly explains developments in the study of genetics to reveal the ancestry of modern canids and the astonishing hybridization among them. In addition to showcasing the diversity of our planet’s dogs, the book presents the latest research on the ecology, behavior, and society of wild dog species. These compelling descriptions with beautiful photographs—including life-size snout images of each of the thirty-seven wild canid species and over two hundred global breeds—offer readers of The Book of Dogs a chance to meet and understand our companions and their kin like never before.

Colorful, mysterious, and often fantastically shaped, fungi have been a source of wonder and fascination since the earliest hunter-gatherers first foraged for them. Today there are few, if any, places on Earth where fungi have not found themselves a home. And these highly specialized organisms are an indispensable part of the great chain of life. They not only partner in symbiotic relationships with over ninety percent of the world’s trees and flowering plant species, they also recycle and create humus, the fertile soil from which such flora receive their nutrition. Some fungi are parasites or saprotrophs; many are poisonous and, yes, hallucinogenic; others possess life-enhancing properties that can be tapped for pharmaceutical products; while a delicious few are prized by epicureans and gourmands worldwide.

In this lavishly illustrated volume, six hundred fungi from around the globe get their full due. Each species here is reproduced at its actual size, in full color, and is accompanied by a scientific explanation of its distribution, habitat, association, abundance, growth form, spore color, and edibility. Location maps give at-a-glance indications of each species’ known global distribution, and specially commissioned engravings show different fruitbody forms and provide the vital statistics of height and diameter. With information on the characteristics, distinguishing features, and occasionally bizarre habits of these fungi, readers will find in this book the common and the conspicuous, the unfamiliar and the odd. There is a fungal predator, for instance, that hunts its prey with lassos, and several that set traps, including one that entices sows by releasing the pheromones of a wild boar.

Mushrooms, morels, puffballs, toadstools, truffles, chanterelles—fungi from habitats spanning the poles and the tropics, from the highest mountains to our own backyards—are all on display in this definitive work.

Of all our childhood memories, few are quite as thrilling, or as tactile, as those of climbing trees. Scampering up the rough trunk, spying on the world from the cool green shelter of the canopy, lying on a limb and looking up through the leaves at the summer sun almost made it seem as if we were made for trees, and trees for us.Even in adulthood, trees retain their power, from the refreshing way their waves of green break the monotony of a cityscape to the way their autumn transformations take our breath away. 

In this lavishly illustrated volume, the trees that have enriched our lives finally get their full due, through a focus on the humble leaves that serve, in a sense, as their public face. The Book of Leaves offers a visually stunning and scientifically engaging guide to six hundred of the most impressive and beautiful leaves from around the world. Each leaf is reproduced here at its actual size, in full color, and is accompanied by an explanation of the range, distribution, abundance, and habitat of the tree on which it’s found. Brief scientific and historical accounts of each tree and related species include fun-filled facts and anecdotes that broaden its portrait. 

The Henry’s Maple, for instance, found in China and named for an Irish doctor who collected leaves there, bears little initial resemblance to the statuesque maples of North America, from its diminutive stature to its unusual trifoliolate leaves. Or the Mediterranean Olive, which has been known to live for more than 1,500 years and whose short, narrow leaves only fall after two or three years, pushed out in stages by the emergence of younger leaves.

From the familiar friends of our backyards to the giants of deep woods, The Book of Leaves brings the forest to life—and to our living rooms—as never before.

This work is a vibrant tribute to Richard Stephen Felger, who was one of the most influential scientists of the American Southwest and northwestern Mexico. Known as a desert botanist, Felger’s work transcended regional boundaries, blending rigorous fieldwork with global ecological vision. This work offers an intimate and multifaceted portrait of a man whose tireless advocacy for biodiversity and biocultural conservation shaped generations of desert scientists..

Edited by Benjamin T. Wilder, Bill Broyles, and Thomas Bowen, this book is both a celebration and a resource. The work is separated into four parts. With humor, insight, and deep empathy, Felger’s own voice leads the journey in part 1, recounting his most memorable field experiences with masterful prose and sly wit. Part 2 brings together heartfelt reflections from colleagues who worked alongside Felger in the field, revealing the eccentric brilliance and relentless curiosity that defined his career. Part 3 explores his family history and the unconventional path that shaped his life’s work, while part 4 presents a comprehensive bibliography of his most important publications. The book contains four maps that help take you around the world on Felger’s journeys, and fifty images selected from the thousands of slides from his archive that further transport and anchor you in the adventure.

Felger’s own voice, paired with reflections from twenty colleagues, creates a rich, multifaceted narrative, offering readers a rare glimpse into the life of a scientific icon whose legacy continues to inspire desert researchers and conservationists across the globe.

Contributors

James Aronson

Thomas Bowen

Bill Broyles

Alberto Búrquez

Susan Davis Carnahan

Mark Alan Dimmitt

Exequiel Ezcurra

Gil Gillenwater

Russ Kleinman

Angelina Martínez-Yrízar

Gregory McNamee

Cathy Moser Marlett

Gary Paul Nabhan

Wallace J. Nichols

William R. Norris

Humberto Romero Morales

Sue Rutman

Silke Schneider

Jeffrey Seminoff

Jane Spinti

Benjamin T. Wilder

From 1974 to the present, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin has carried out archaeological excavations in the ancient territory (chora) of Metaponto, now located in the modern province of Basilicata on the southern coast of Italy. This wide-ranging investigation, which covers a number of sites and a time period ranging from prehistory to the Roman Empire, has unearthed a wealth of new information about the ancient rural economy in southern Italy. These discoveries will be published in a multi-volume series titled The Chora of Metaponto. This volume on archaeozoology—the study of animal remains from archaeological sites—is the second in the series, following The Chora of Metaponto: The Necropoleis (1998).

Archaeozoology at Pantanello and Five Other Sites describes the animal remains found throughout Metaponto and discusses what they reveal about ancient practices of hunting and herding, domestication and importation of new breeds, people's attitudes toward animals, and what animal remains indicate about past environments. A chapter devoted to bird bones, which are a relatively rare find because of their fragility, provides high quality information on the environment and methods of fowling, as well as on the beliefs and symbolism associated with birds. The final chapter covers tools—some simple, others sophisticated and richly decorated—made from animal bones.

A principal coloration scientist offers a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated synthesis of coloration in mammals, weaving together contemporary research on evolution, underlying genetics, visual systems, and relevance to humans. 

Why are giant pandas black and white, mandrills red and blue, but mice brown? How do mammalian colors and patterns develop? And why do we see in three colors, but deer do not? A cadre of evolutionary scientists, including geneticists, behavioral ecologists, visual ecologists, and anthropologists has worked for over a century to answer these and other questions about the origin and functions of mammal coloration in nature. One of them is celebrated biologist Tim Caro, who has studied animal coloration for over three decades. In this landmark book, he presents a synthesis of experimental and observational studies to explain how and why animal coloration has evolved for three primary reasons: protection against predators, communication, and to respond to environmental factors. Furthermore, Caro provides accessible descriptions of the various genetic and visual mechanisms that have shaped mammals’ extraordinarily diverse colors and patterns. 

Victorian naturalists were the first to recognize that coloration influences individuals’ survival and reproduction, and this led to an explosion of research on its adaptive significance a century later. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, biologists began to work on the genomic and developmental basis of coloration. Since then, genetic studies on model organisms, particularly mice, have led to a deep understanding of the genes regulating the production of melanin pigments and lately, pattern formation. Simultaneously, scientists have studied organisms’ color perception. However, these functional, molecular, and mechanistic approaches rarely overlap, as they historically emanate from different areas of science. In this book, Caro ties these areas of research together for the first time. Caro outlines perception and production of color; teases apart different aspects of protective coloration; discusses social and sexual signaling; explores environmental drivers of coloration in nonhuman mammals, including domesticated species; and discusses human biology and our use of color in clothing. The resulting volume offers readers both a holistic view of today’s science and an honest assessment of the remaining questions for future research.