Books about natural history

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.

For millennia the animals that populated the earth had four toes on each foot, or six. If evolution had taken a tiny shift - if our ancestors had inherited a couple of genes in a different form - our canonical number, based on our fingers and toes, might be eight instead of ten. This book deploys this, which is one of the oddities of history.

This text is a metaphor for the way individuals and unpredictable events influence history. In response history, suggests the author, is the best model for evolution. The author explores the science of improbable outcomes in this wide ranging book written on the evolutionary theme.

An account of a revolution in our understanding of life's history, this book tells how three obscure British scientists completely changed our view of evolution by discovering a unique group of 530 million year-old creatures in the Burgess Shale fossil deposit in the Rockies.

When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. This title shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and events.

In this new collection of essays, Gould has once again applied biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the origins of palaeontology to modern eugenics and genetic engineering.

Presents contemporary beliefs about Divine Providence and the beginnings of life on earth. Written for the general public of the 1850s, this title provides an account of the scientific theory that lies at the root of our attitude to the universe.

With other essays on conservation from Round River .

In Darwin's time, island biogeography was the science that opened Victorian minds to the wonder of evolution. Today with all the world's wild landscape being chopped into island-like fragments, it's the science of jeopardy and extinction. This book combines science, historical narrative and travel.

A collection of Gilbert White's letters to the explorer and naturalist Daines Barrington and the eminent zoologist Thomas Pennant - White's intellectual lifelines from his country-village home. This title presents an evocation of the lives of the flora and fauna of eighteenth-century England.

Sometimes it's pretty hard to tell them apart - my family and the animals, that is. I don't know why my brothers and sisters complain so much. With snakes in the bath and scorpions on the lunch table, our house, on the island of Corfu, is a bit like a circus. So they should feel right at home.

First published in 1998, this collection of essays contains some of Gould's best writing on a variety of subjects ranging from Leonardo da Vinci and Martin Luther to fossils and the history of science, including fascinating oddities from the natural world and the printed word.

This collection of essays apply biographical perspectives to the illumination of key scientific concepts and their history, ranging from the discovery of the scourge of syphilis by Fracastero in the 16th century to Isabelle Duncan's 19th-century attempt at reconciling scripture and palaeontology.

For millennia, nature's biggest and fiercest predators have tormented mankind. The knowledge and fear of the existence of these ferocious man-eaters is forever in the back of our minds, looming in our worst nightmares. Millions of humans have suffered attacks by predators on land and at sea. Yet animals have always shared the landscape with humans. Since the dawn of time our ecosystems have been .

The record of an odyssey by a zoologist and a zoologically-innocent comic novelist. It began in 1985 with a search for a rare lemur in Madagascar and went on to include expeditions which witnessed fruitbats, man-eating lizards, gorillas, a blind dolphin and the most inept parrot, the kakapot.