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Birds are among the most successful vertebrates on Earth. An important part of our natural environment and deeply embedded in our culture, birds are studied by more professional ornithologists and enjoyed by more amateur enthusiasts than ever before. However, both amateurs and professionals typically focus on birds' behaviour and appearance and only superficially understand the characteristics that make birds so unique. The Inner Bird introduces readers to the avian skeleton, then moves beyond anatomy to discuss the relationships between birds and dinosaurs and other early ancestors. Gary Kaiser examines the challenges scientists face in understanding avian evolution - even recent advances i...
“Rare insights into the trials and joys of scientific discovery.” —Publisher’s Weekly
Organized as a town in 1787, Woodstock has since been defined by a triangle of three distinct and powerful influences, weaving an uneasy balance: the legacies of the arts and crafts colony established at Byrdcliffe, the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival held in Bethel, and the people who live and work and raise families in the community. Woodstock provides a fascinating look at the community from the 1890s through the 1980s. With more than two hundred stunning images, it revisits the days when the center was simply a sleepy grass-covered village square. Shown are many buildings that no longer exist: the boarding homes, the icehouses, the bowling alley. The story captures the community as it passes through the arts-colony and music-festival years to become the busy tourist town it is today.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ride around with the police, witnessing their every call? That¿s exactly what Ride Along invites the reader to do. Set in the mid-seventies, Ride Along is a police procedural mystery. Kathy Cooper, while serving on a grand jury, has the opportunity to learn what street-level police work is really like when she rides along with on-duty Houston Police officers. She asks to see police work without sanitation or censorship. From kidnaping hostage cases to secret meetings with snitches, Kathy doesn¿t want to be left out of anything. She loves every minute of it and to her surprise discovers she wants to be a cop. But, can she overcome her husband¿s objections, being past the Houston Police Departments maximum age limit and being indicted, arrested and tried for murder? A rich story, chocked full of facts and alive with colorful characters, Ride Along is gripping from start to finish.
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From the discovery of the fossil Archaeopteryx to more than 10,000 different documented species today, birds have become the second most diversified class of vertebrates on Earth. Birds have evolved extensively since they first emerged in prehistoric times--but that diversity could dwindle and even vanish unless we take steps to conserve their habitats, ensuring that they sustain their numbers and their variety. This natural history of birds starts in the distant past--going back to the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Paleogene periods--in order to get a broader understanding of the birds that we see today. Chapters cover their lives, breeding, flight, migration and more, while also highlighting some especially unique bird fossils, such as the Pelagornis Sandersi, which had a wingspan of more than 20 feet. Also included are chapters on the loss of needed habitats, the current decline of native birds, and what can be done to reverse it.
A gripping history of the polar continent, from the great discoveries of the nineteenth century to modern scientific breakthroughs Antarctica, the ice kingdom hosting the South Pole, looms large in the human imagination. The secrets of this vast frozen desert have long tempted explorers, but its brutal climate and glacial shores notoriously resist human intrusion. Land of Wondrous Cold tells a gripping story of the pioneering nineteenth-century voyages, when British, French, and American commanders raced to penetrate Antarctica’s glacial rim for unknown lands beyond. These intrepid Victorian explorers—James Ross, Dumont D’Urville, and Charles Wilkes—laid the foundation for our curren...