Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit

by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten

Sumptuous birds of paradise, amazing soft shell turtles, frogs that look like tomatoes, and terrifying fish (including the deep-water angler fish from Finding Nemo) are just some of the extraordinary creatures that can be found in Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten's new book Astonishing Animals. Superbly illustrated in lifelike full color paintings, Astonishing Animals details ninety of the world's most amazing animals from around the world. In this...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871138751
• ISBN13: 9780871138750
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.7" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Astonishing Animals is an astonishing book

This large delightfully illustrated book over 200 pages, first published in Australia in 2004, and now by Atlantic Monthly Press in New York, is not a kids' book, (although it could serve as one for older kids or for kids who can grow into it). It's great for adults - I learned a lot from this book's information, primarily on creatures on land or in oceans around Australia, Borneo, Madagascar, & New Guinea. I didn't know a lot of these creatures existed, much less the astonishing facts about them. I even learned a lot from the preface. I love this book!

A beautiful book with some ugly animals!

As a devoted amateur, vertebrate evolution is one of my hobbies, especially that of mammals. I am frequently the person my acquaintances come to, to ask questions about animals. Yet there were things in this book I had never heard of. Certainly the imaginary beast was one I hadn't heard of :D At first, my suspicion was that the one that the author claims would perhaps be named after him, would be imaginary. However, a little research on the web revealed that this animal exists, has since been named, and no, it isn't named after Tim Flannery. (A little web research easily revealed the true culprit, as well.) The authors' sense of humor is not limited to the imaginary animal. There are other humorous notes, such as the Cape rain frog, which is included "because it is one of the silliest-looking creatures there is." Another reviewer has already described the sections quite well, so I will not repeat that, but will just mention a few of the particular things that struck me about the contents. A great many of the animals in the book are birds. I admit I don't know nearly as much about birds as I do about mammals, so I perhaps was more easily astonished than a regular birder might be. I also overdosed on birds a bit faster than someone who is fascinated by them might - I wanted to get on to the mammals. I found the inclusion of several different pheasants a bit repetitious, and likewise several different birds of paradise, but they are truly beautiful birds, and wanting more mammals is only my personal preference. The illustrations are beautiful. I might have liked a few actual photographs, but many of these animals would have been difficult to photograph. I might also quibble with a few selections - pretty much everyone is familiar with the platypus, and many zoos now have colonies of naked mole rats. So, while interesting, these critters are no longer astonishing. On the other hand, some of the animals were truly astonishing: the curlew-jawed mormyrid, which looks an awful lot like an echidna for something that's a fish! And I really would not have believed in the existence of the dense-beaked whale if I hadn't gone to other resources and seen actual photographs of it. The stoplight loosejaw could give a person nightmares. One of the really neat features is the exactly life-size pictures of the pygmy chameleon, the bee hummingbird, and the smallest bat in the world, along with the more-than-a-meter-long slender snipe-eel. This book is often described as a "coffee table book" but it would make an excellent gift for any young person interested in animals and in need of a challenge to learn more about them, and whoever owns the book, child or adult, will leaf through it far more often than most coffee table books ever get opened.

Gorgeous artwork of bizarre and exotic animals

_Astonishing Animals_ by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten is an absolutely gorgeous coffee-table sized book, a work of splendid artwork and informative and occasionally humorous text. Producers of the similarly excellent _A Gap in Nature_, the authors this time concentrate not on animals that became extinct in historical times but living, odd, extraordinary animals, many of them quite unfamiliar to me and I daresay many armchair naturalists. The first section is titled "The Vertical Terrain" and focuses on animals in mountainous terrains, specifically tropical mountains, which can have habitats varying from snow and alpine meadow at the summit to lowland jungle at its base. We meet in this section the Ribbon-tailed Astrapia of New Guinea, a bird of paradise with the longest tail feathers relative to body size of any bird (they are over three times longer than the bird's body). Similarly unusual is the King of Saxony Bird of Paradise, also of New Guinea; in this species the brow plumes of the male bird are over twice the length of the bird's body, looking somewhat like very oddly shaped huge antennae. The second section is titled "Motion Specialists," and focuses on species that move in innovative and unexpected ways. The Mysore Slender Loris of India is a lemur-like primate of the thorny acacia forest, notably in that it moves in a slow, deliberate manner, always keeping grasp of the branches with at least three of its limbs, always from above, never from below. The third section is called "Food & Feeding" and details animals with unusual diets and feeding techniques. We meet the Dingiso, a ground-dwelling tree-kangaroo (as contradictory as that might sound) discovered by Flannery himself in 1994 in the wilds of New Guinea. Delacour's Langur from the forests of central Vietnam is a beautiful but poorly studied primate, boasting a "pot belly" which contains a large stomach that is capable of fermenting the leaves upon which it feeds. The Curlew-jawed Mormyrid of South America is a freshwater fish with a long proboscis and the ability to generate its own electric field; both are used by the fish to find its aquatic prey, information from both is sent to its brain, the largest relative to body weight of any fish. Pesquet's Parrot of New Guinea looks more like a vulture than a parrot, with a bald-head and a long bill, though it does not feed on dead animals but the droppings of cassowaries (specifically the undigested fruits seeds within the feces). The fourth section is "Shape-shifters," focusing on animals of unusual shapes and sizes. The Oriental Bay Owl of southern Asia looks like, when at rest, a broken, lichen-covered branch, all but impossible to see. The garish-colored Tomato Frog of Madagascar looks like a ripe tomato, an example of convergent evolution with the poison arrow frogs of the Americas. The authors produce life-sized pictures of the bumble bee-sized Kitti's Hognosed Bat of Thailand and the Bee Hummingbird of Cuba (whic