Geerat J. Vermeij is Distinguished Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Evolutionary World: How Adaptation Explains Everything from Seashells to Civilization; Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life; Nature: An Economic History (Princeton); and Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life (Princeton). From "one of the master naturalists of our time" (American Scientist),...

Debbie Busby is an equine behaviorist with degrees in applied animal behavior and welfare and psychology. She is certified by the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants and runs the website Evolution Equine. Catrin Rutland is associate professor of anatomy and developmental genetics at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Nottingham, UK. She writes about science for a number of leading UK newspapers and magazines, including...

From a single beginning, countless millions of stories from the animal kingdom have - and continue to - run their course. Museum objects allow us to investigate some of those stories. Animal Kingdom journeys through both the evolutionary history of animals, and the ways that people have interpreted them in museums. Animals in museums are not only representatives of their entire species, but they also tell us something about the time in which they...

Formed by glaciers more than twelve thousand years ago, Lake Ontario has captivated nature lovers for generations. Unique among the Great Lakes for having once, been connected to the sea, fossils from ocean life have been, found near the lake's shores. Damage done to Lake Ontario's ecosystem from centuries of human activity was center stage in the fight to pass the Clean Water Act and the restoration that followed. From incredibly diverse bird migrations...

John Kricher is professor emeritus of biology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and an internationally recognized ecologist, ornithologist, and author. His books include The New Neotropical Companion, Tropical Ecology, and The Balance of Nature (all Princeton). Kevin Loughlin is a nature photographer and tour guide who has led more than forty trips to Galápagos. His photos and writing have appeared in many magazines, including Living Bird and Birding....

From the peaks of the Continental Divide to the expanse of its eastern prairie, Montana contains some of America's richest wildlife habitat. Wilderness guide and author Don Thomas offers a series of personal ecological reflections on subjects as grand as the grizzly, as controversial as the wolf and as obscure as the upland plover. From native lore and the observations of Lewis and Clark to the present day, Thomas traces the history of human attitudes...

Dennis Paulson is one of the world's leading experts on dragonflies and damselflies and has watched and photographed his favorite insect on every continent. He is the author of the major field guides to North American species, Dragonflies of the West and Dragonflies of the East (both Princeton), and has written more than fifty scientific papers on the group. Now retired from his position as the director of the Salter Museum of Natural History at the...