"It's a unique illustrated guide for everyone who loves picking up shells on the beach or finding a trove of colorful feathers. Celebrating the wonders of the physical world and the joys of being an amateur naturalist and collector. Cabinet of Curiosities explains how to identity, find, collect, and preserve leaves, butterflies, the skulls of wild animals, quills, snake skins, and snake rattles - and make a cabinet of curiosities to display your specimens....

"Readers explore the world of biological taxonomy. Includes the colorful history of taxonomy and is supported with primary sources, imagery of plants and animals, and a section on the future"--

If an alien visitor were to collect ten souvenir life forms to represent life on earth, which would they be? This is the thought-provoking premise of Marianne Taylor's The Story of Life in 10 and a Half Species. Each life forms explains a key aspect about life on Earth. From the sponge that seems to be a plant but is really an animal to the almost extinct soft-shelled turtle deemed extremely unique and therefore extremely precious, these examples...

How are polar bears related to pandas? For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have tried to organize and understand, or classify, the relationships among Earth's animals and plants. Early classification systems were cumbersome and inconsistent. In the late 1720s, Carl Linnaeus began developing a classification system to describe relationships among all living things, including animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. This organization, called...

This surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world illuminates science's limitations and the urgency of staying connected to the natural world by using familiar, rather than scientific, names.