It’s nonfiction Friday and we are featuring two new books that launched this week. Mammals by Katharine Hall and Sharks and Dolphins by Kevin Kurtz!
Written for young nature enthusiasts the Compare and Contrast Book series takes children into the wild with beautiful photographs and simple text to explain complicated concepts.
Author Katharine Hall began the series with Polar Bears and Penguins showing children that these animals live at opposite ends of the earth. Then she dove into plant life with Trees and flew to the sky with Clouds. Hall set her sights on slithering and slimy creatures comparing the similarities and differences in Amphibians and Reptiles even introducing the field of herpetology to young readers. This week Mammals joins the lineup comparing animals that live on land and in the sea along with two-legged and four-legged animals.
Teaming up with Hall, aquatic educator and expert Kevin Kurtz joined the Compare and Contrast Book series releasing Sharks and Dolphins this week. The no-nonsense facts will help young readers understand that although both of these animals live in the salty ocean each has a different way of life.
Extend the learning with great activities in our Teaching Activities Guide. This, along with author interviews and more information about the series is available on each book’s homepage. Visit Mammals or Sharks and Dolphins to learn more.
Win your very own copy of each of these books on Goodreads!
By Peter S. Ungar
Most of us only think about teeth when something’s wrong with them — when they come in crooked, break, or begin to rot. But take a minute to consider your teeth as the extraordinary feat of engineering they are. They concentrate and transmit the forces needed to break food, again and again, up to millions of times over a lifetime. And they do it without themselves being broken in the process — with the very same raw materials used to make the plants and animals being eaten.
Chewing is like a perpetual death match in the mouth, with plants and animals developing tough or hard tissues for protection, and teeth evolving ways to sharpen or strengthen themselves to overcome those defenses. Most living things don’t want to be eaten. They often protect themselves by reinforcing their parts to stop eaters from breaking them into small enough bits to swallow or digest. It could be a hard shell to keep a crack from starting, or tough fibers to keep one from spreading. Either way, the eater still has to eat. And that’s where teeth come in. The variety of tooth types, especially across the mammals, is extraordinary. It’s a testament to what evolution can accomplish given time, motive, and opportunity.
Lots of animals have “teeth”; sea urchins, spiders, and slugs all have hardened tissues used for food acquisition and processing. But real teeth, like yours and mine, are special. They first appeared half a billion years ago, and Nature has spent the whole time since tinkering with ways to make them better. It’s a story written in stone – the fossil record. We see the appearance of a hard, protective coating of enamel, better ways of attaching tooth to jaw, differentiation of front and back teeth, tighter fit between opposing surfaces, and a new joint for precise movements of the jaw.
The motive is endothermy; we mammals heat our bodies from within. And chewing allows us to squeeze the energy we need to fuel our furnaces. The opportunity is evolvability; very slight genetic tweaks can have dramatic effects on tooth form and function. Consider the incredible variety of different tooth types in mammals, matched so well to the foods individual species eat. A lion has sharp-crested chewing teeth, with blades opposing one another like a pair of scissors, for slicing flesh. A cow has broad, flat ones broken by thin, curved ridges, like a cheese grater, for milling grass. You and I have thick molars with rounded cusps that fit neatly into opposing basins, like a mortar and pestle, for crushing and grinding whatever it is we eat.
There can be little doubt that the diversity, abundance, and success of mammals, including us, are due, in no small measure, to our teeth. Look in a mirror, smile, and think about it.
Peter S. Ungar received his PhD in Anthropological Sciences from Stony Brook University and taught Gross Anatomy in the medical schools at Johns Hopkins and Duke before moving to the University of Arkansas, where he now serves as Distinguished Professor and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology. He has written or co-authored more than 125 scientific papers on ecology and evolution for books and journals and is the author of Teeth: A Very Short Introduction.
The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday, subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS, and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook.
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Image credit: Gebitsdiagram Chart created with Open Dental By Jordan Sparks. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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These are three of four panels, Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, Insects, created, again, for the Woodland Park Zoo. I can't find the birds and I have to run out the door.... oops. They were going to be used to commemorate the acquisition of an African White Rhino ( on mammal panel )....and be the four sides of a metal bank to be sold in the gift shop...but the Rhino never came...and the bank was never made. The art remains anyway.....
By John D. Altringham
2011-12 is the International Year of the Bat sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme. Yes, that’s right – we are devoting a whole year to these neglected and largely misunderstood creatures. Perhaps if I give you a few bat facts and figures you might begin to see why.
I've been primarily writing books for the K-3 range for the past several years, and one of the educational publishers I write steadily for is Picture Window Books. I really enjoy writing for them, and I love the finished books. I think I have a good sense of writing for this age range, and I usually don't have to do any revisions at all once I've turned in a manuscript. Not that nothing changes. But the changes are minimal enough that the editor makes the changes and I just see them on the galleys.
Not this time. Earlier this fall, I did a set of three animal classification books. The Amphibians manuscript had already been checked over, edited, and approved, with just a couple of questions asked of me for clarification. But yesterday morning, as I slogged through my post-holiday email and to-do list, I received a bad news email from my editor about my second manuscript going through the process, Mammals.
Basically, the manuscript needs major revision. It wasn't as well organized as the Amphibians one. I need better organization and more specific examples. The editor said all this kindly, of course.
But how embarrassing. I did struggle with which info to include on Mammals, because there's so much info available, and because mammals are such a diverse group. It was much easier to discuss what amphibians have in common, because amphibians are, in general, much more like each other than mammals are.
Anyway, my writing project for this week is no longer to revise a trade rhyming picture book I'm working on. It's now to rewrite Mammals, and to create a manuscript I'm proud of and my editor is satisfied with. Wish me luck!
It's a shame the Bank usage didn't materialise, but they were printed on other things weren't they? I hope you were adequately compensated!