The Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Animals: A Visual Who's Who of the World's Creatures

by Philip Whitfield

Book Overview

Dr. Philip Whitfield, lecturer in Zoology at King's College, London, has compiled this weighty, authoritative, and beautiful volume about the five classes of vertebrates: mammals, birds, reptiles,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684852373
• ISBN13: 9780684852379
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 616 Pages
• Weight: 6.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 9.5" x 11.7"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

Amazing

I love this book. I adore all animals, and I've wanted an encyclopedia of them for a long time. I finally bought this one, and I love it! The drawing are beautifull, and the information is very helpful. It has all the old favorites, like lions, zeberas,ducks, bullfrogs, etc., but it also has obscure animals, like piped currawongs, malleefowl, bandy-bandys, and cane rats. You can learn so much from this book. You can use it as a reference, or just read it straight through . Everyone who loves the animal kingdom should have this book.

A book to teach children to respect animals.

Have you ever seen an "okapi," a "serow," or a "hutia" ? Neither had I. This is a book for everyone. Children will be fascinated and adults enlightened. It is a heavy book you would not want to carry home from the library. I recommend you purchase your own copy. Once you see how beautiful this book is, you will also want to recommend it to your school librarian as a reference book. There is a classification section and a complete index which one would expect from such an encyclopedic work. I was shocked to read in the foreword that within the next 80-100 years, many of the beautiful creatures described in this book would become extinct. This is definitely a book for all those who value our fascinating planet. If you love animals, this is your ultimate guide to learning more. With over 2,000 illustrations of mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and amphibians, this is truly an incredible visual catalogue of who is who in the animal kingdom. Each illustrated animal is described in detail. The feeding habits, behaviors, geographic range and habitat is also included. The publishing company also employed some of the world's finest wildlife artists to beautifully create each picture. ~The Rebecca Review

good, but lacked regional information

This book was good for a 'getting to know you' on certain types of animals, however, it lacked many specific regional animals and it didn't clearly state where the animals were located. This is definately a reference and not for someone looking to figure out what's lurking in their backyard.

Excellent coverage, but taxa biased

This book is monumental and for the price it is certainly a steal. Classification is current and coverage is amazing. As I mentioned, there certainly is a taxonomical bias in this book. The fish class is by far the largest vertebrate class; however, many more pages are spent on mammals and birds which when combined still have less species than the fish class. This is acceptable, considering many more people are interested in birds and mammals. However, this means that the coverage of the fish class is not as taxonomically specific. As such, most of the coverage of the fish class is only down to order, not family or subfamily as it sometimes is in the bird and mammal sections. Coverage of all the fish families would entail much more work and there is already an entire book (Fishes of the World by Joseph S. Nelson $125) written on this (but much poorer illustrations, just line drawings).Overall an excellent book! It is a good starting book for the aspiring zoologist. After reading/looking at this book one will be interested in why there are so many different species out there, how they are different, and what path led to them becoming as they now are. After this book I would recommend additional books in Mammalogy (Mammalogy: Adaptation, Diversity, and Ecology; by George Feldhamer), Ornithology (Ornithology; by Frank B. Gill), Herpetology (Herpetology: An Introductory Biology of Amphibians and Reptiles; by George Zug), and Ichthyology (Biology of Fishes, Carl E. Bond). After these books one can always expand to the invertebrates (especially the insects) and even switch kingdoms to plant, fungi...

The advertisement should make clear geographic coverage.

Down in the South Hemisphere, we have a completely different fauna. Let alone Australia, which besides South has a fauna of its own. This book should specify, it is written only for Europe and North America? Are the South american and Australian animals included?