Natural History

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

The past is past, but it does leave clues, and Thomas Halliday has used cutting-edge science to decipher them more completely than ever before. In Otherlands, Halliday makes sixteen fossil sites burst to life....

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories.

Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the future of Earth.

A leading neuroscientist offers a history of the evolution of the brain from unicellular organisms to the complexity of animals and human beings today....

The world is changing at a relentless pace. How can we slow down and act from a place of respect for all living things? The Sacred Balance shows us how....

Filled to the brim with far-out facts, this wickedly informative narrative from the author of National Geographic's popular Gory Details blog takes us on a fascinating journey through an astonishing new reality....

Birds. Over 9,000 species, the most widespread of all animals. David Attenborough has been watching and learning all his life. His classic book, now fully updated with the latest discoveries in ornithology, is a brilliant introduction to bird behaviours around the world....

A pioneering and groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on the history of humankind, showing how through millennia, the mosquito has been the single most powerful force in determining humanity’s fate....

An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation’s Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it....

A behind-the-scenes account of the discovery of the oldest skeleton of a human ancestor, named "Ardi"—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution....

This is the third and last of Sir David’s great natural history books based on his TV series and completes his survey of the animal world that began with Life on Earth and continues with Living Planet....

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods comes a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history....

Cutting-edge techniques across biology, chemistry, physics, and geology have transformed our understanding of the deep past, including the discovery of a previously unknown mass extinction....

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology....

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents....

In this "wise and wondrous" (David Quammen) exploration, a science writer reintroduces audiences to The Snake, encouraging our initial reaction to the slithery creature to be one of awe rather than disgust.

Gerald Durrell was 10 when he moved to Corfu, where he met intoxicated hedgehogs and a menagerie of eccentric friends....

From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world....

The Sixth Extinction draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines to provide a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept.

In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity....

For the whole of human history, we have lived alongside birds. Naturalist and author Stephen Moss tells the gripping story of this long and intimate relationship through key species from all seven of the world’s continents....

Red is a brilliantly told, captivating history of red hair throughout the ages. An audiobook that breaks new ground, dispels myths, and reinforces the special nature of being a redhead, with a look at multiple disciplines, including science, religion, politics, feminism and sexuality....

A lifelong acolyte of the natural world, Annie Proulx brings her witness and research to the subject of wetlands and the vitally important role they play in preserving the environment—by storing the carbon emissions that accelerate climate change....