Kirjahaku

Enormous, elephantine and extinct: the mammoth is the iconic animal of the Ice Age. These colossal creatures roamed the cold, open landscapes of Europe, Asia, and North America as recently as 20,000 years ago. Today, their well-preserved fossil remains generate much fascination and speculation around the world. Mammoths: Ice Age Giants reveals what their life was really like. It describes their environment, behaviour, evolution and appearance, including new DNA analysis that shows what colour mammoths actually were. Unravelling the latest scientific research, Adrian Lister explains why this incredible species died out and whether it may be possible to clone them in the future. He also draws challenging parallels between the fate of the mammoths and that of their close relatives, the living elephants. Throughout the book there are striking photographs of skeletons, skulls, tusks and preserved flesh from the world-famous collections of the Natural History Museum in London, as well as images of the best preserved mammoth in the world, Lyuba. From the Pleistocene period to our recent past, Mammoths: Ice Age Giants captures evolution in action in the dynamic world of the mammoth.The book is published to tie in with a major new exhibition on mammoths opening at the Natural History Museum in spring 2014.

Charles Darwin's voyage on the HMS Beagle was a journey that would revolutionise our understanding of the natural world and our place in it. The magisterial work it spawned, On the Origin of Species, is widely associated with the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands. Less well known is Darwin's passion for geology and how his fossil discoveries in South America - by demonstrating the relationship between extinct lifeforms and living species - shaped his theory of evolution. This is the story of those fossil-hunting adventures in the 1830s, the pioneering science behind the fossils he found, and how these remarkable discoveries played a crucial role in forging Darwin's revolutionary ideas.