Diatoms to Dinosaurs

By Christopher McGowan, Julian Mulock (illustrator),

Book cover of Diatoms to Dinosaurs: The Size And Scale Of Living Things

Book description

A mouse weighs about one ounce, has a heart rate of 700 beats per minute, a gestation period of 21 days, and lives for less than 3 years. A 5-ton elephant has a heart rate of 30 beats per minute, a 22 month gestation period, a slow metabolic rate and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Diatoms to Dinosaurs as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is another of those books that made a huge impression on me as a student. It’s also one of the very few popular books that I have kept coming back to over and over throughout my professional career.

Scaling isn’t a natural subject for the popular science treatment, given that so much of the relevant scientific literature revolves around esoteric bickering over the values of exponents, but McGowan does a fantastic job of explaining the physical and physiological principles involved. More importantly, he shows the many ways that an organism’s size affects the way that it lives its…

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Book cover of What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs

What Walks This Way By Sharman Apt Russell,

Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…

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