Marvels & Mysteries of Our Animal World

by Reader's Digest Association

Full-color illustrated oversize hardback. Many pictures and lots of text about animals. Indexed. Animal identification guide.

Genres: Animals

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. is a global media and direct marketing company based in Chappaqua, New York, best known for its flagship publication founded in 1922, Reader's Digest. The company's headquarters are in New York City, where it moved from Pleasantville, New York.

The company was founded by DeWitt and Lila Wallace in 1922 with the first publication of Reader's Digest magazine, but has grown to include a diverse range of magazines, books, music, DVDs and online content.

Reviews

[Ashley]

Filled with absolutely amazing stories from assorted individuals on each animal covered in this book, I loved getting to read them!

[Annabelle]

First published in 1964, this precious compilation shows why Reader's Digest was at the top of its game. The book features well-researched sketches on some of the world's most extraordinary animals. While the photography may seem dated in this age of impossibly sharp photography, the writing is elucidating, and breathlessly illuminates its subjects. Each article educates, fascinates, and ultimately moves the reader. Intriguing, too, particularly the story about the re-appearing coelacanth, a fish long thought to be extinct, and the shrike. Dubbed by Alan Devoe as the butcherbird/Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, the shrike is an affable, demure little songbird with "neither the size nor the equipment for massacre," but "is a bloodier killer than the hawk," often impaling its prey on a thorn or barbed wire. But the chapter on extinct and endangered species, aptly titled The Vanished and the Vanishing, was particularly heartbreaking for me. Most desolating of all was Once There Were Billions by Maitland Edey. No hyperbole here. In 1810 ornithologist Alexander Wilson sat down on the bank of a creek in Kentucky to count clouds of passenger pigeons flying overhead. "They flew steadily past him at a speed he estimated to be 60 miles an hour, in closely packed columns--not less than three birds to a cubic yard of air--on a front more than a mile wide. An hour later this torrent had widened and deepened. They continued pouring by until after nightfall. Altogether, Wilson estimated the flock was 240 miles long and contained 2,230,272,000 pigeons. Incredible? John James Audubon, calculating the population of another flight in 1813, conservatively arrived at half Wilson's figure, but was left with a single flock of more than a billion." Man's rapacity was to prove more incredible. The pigeons' nesting grounds were fairly easy game for settlers of the United States's easter section. Throughout the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, the killing and shipment of passenger pigeons strains belief--from half a million, a million, two million birds were being shipped out in a matter of weeks. Such was man's determined obliteration of the passenger pigeons they were never given the chance to reproduce. By 1910, merely a hundred years after Alexander Wilson's billions head count, only one female passenger pigeon named Martha remained, living in the Cincinnati Zoo. Martha died in 1914, "said to be 29 years old, a long life for a pigeon. But not nearly long enough."