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

Great read! | The Book of Animal Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong | John Mitchinson, John Lloyd

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	• The Book of Animal Ignorance: Everything You Think You Know Is Wrong John Mitchinson, John Lloyd Harmony, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Addictive animal trivia

I defy you to read even a few pages of this little book and not be tempted to yell out to whoever else is in the house: "Did you know that ...?" The other person will laugh and say "You made that up!"

This is a perfect book for people who love animals and/or arcane bits of trivia. It is a bestiary of 100 animals -- some common, some you've probably never heard of -- all with secrets you would never guess. You'll never look at your dog the same way; did you know that Labrador retrievers can correctly identify lung cancer in humans 99 percent of the time... just by smelling their breath?

Each animal gets two or three pages, with a couple of black and white illustrations. Organized in alphabetical order, you won't want to stop until you get to the lowly, fascinating worm. Did you know that ribbon worms will eat their own bodies if their food supply runs out? They can eat up to 95 percent of themselves and still survive.

No, I didn't make that up.

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson also wrote The Book of General Ignorance.

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absorbing!

a book from which i can truly say i gained a wealth of information...whimsically written while maintaining an informational voice...only caveat i can complain of is the authors' consistent failure to provide a simple description of each animal's size...given that some of the animals were previously unknown to me, i would have appreciated the information..

Great read!

Fantastic buy! I've passed the book on to so many friends and family members already. Everybody's talking about it. I find myself quoting animal facts to strangers. I'm definately a smarter person for having read it.

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Very Enjoyable!

I learned a lot that I never knew about the animal world in a fun and easy to read format. Very enjoyable and informative, I highly recommend it.

Fast on the heels of the New York Times bestseller The Book of General Ignorance comes The Book of Animal Ignorance, a fun, fact-?lled bestiary that is sure to delight animal lovers everywhere. Arranged alphabetically from aardvark to worm, here are one hundred of the most interesting members of the animal kingdom explained, dissected, and illustrated, with the trademark wit and wisdom of John Lloyd and John Mitchinson.

Did you know, for instance, that
? when a young albatross takes wing, it may stay aloft for ten years
? vampire bat saliva?unsurprisingly, when you think about it?is the source of the world?s most powerful blood thinning drug, appropriately called draculin
? bombardier beetles fire a boiling chemical spray out of their rears at 300 pulses per second
? a bald eagle?s feathers weigh twice as much as its bones
? a giant tortoise recently died at the documented age of 255
? octopuses are dexterous enough to unscrew tops from jars
? spider silk is so light that a strand long enough to circle the world would weigh as much as a bar of soap?

So meet the water bears that can live in suspension for hundreds of years, the parasite carried by your cat that makes men grumpy and women promiscuous, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom. Marvel at elephants that walk on tiptoe, pigs that shine in the dark, and woodpeckers that have ears on the ends of their tongues.

If you still think a pangolin is a musical instrument, that hyenas are dogs, or that sheep are pointless and stupid, The Book of Animal Ignorance has arrived just in time.

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