The Book of Animal Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong

Lloyd and Mitchinson, the respective creator and chief researcher of the British quiz show, Q!, present an alphabetical series of short, hammy articles concerning 100 animals, Aardvark to Gibbon to Pig to Worm. The profiles are written with a snappy ready-for-TV comic style, with a great deal of adolescent elbow-ribbing over sexual appendages and defecation-much of it bizarre and/or repugnant (to humans). One of the better essays describes how a pearl really forms inside an oyster; another looks at pangolins, scale-covered mammals related to dogs. Perhaps most interesting are the clever mechanical drawings by Ted Dewan that illustrate the multiflex wrists of gibbons and diagram the Fossa, a ""dog-cat-mongoose that lives in a tree."" Bomb-like dinner party conversation-starters lie in the physiological and ecological arcana the authors compile; eventually, however, one tires of the inevitable parade of strange, contorted and gruesome descriptions of animal mating. Adults will only be able to stand a few at a time, and excess of sexual description limits the use of the book by younger kids, but should get teenagers and student animal lovers giggling while they learn.