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    The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures
    Unavailable
    The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures
    Unavailable
    The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures
    Ebook576 pages5 hours

    The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures

    By Michael Largo

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The world's wildest collection of animal knowledge and lore!

    Lions, and tigers, and bears . . . and dinosaurs, dragons, and monsters. Oh my!

    For hundreds of years, the most popular books in the Western world next to the Bible were "bestiaries," fanciful encyclopedias collecting all of human knowledge and mythology about the animal kingdom. In these pages, eagles and elephants lived next to griffins and sea monsters. Now, in The Big, Bad Book of Beasts, award-winning author Michael Largo has updated the medieval bestsellers for the twenty-first century, illuminating little-known facts, astonishing secrets, and bizarre superstitions about the beasts that inhabit our world—and haunt our imaginations. You'll learn about the biggest bug ever, the smallest animal in the world, and the real creatures that inspired the fabled unicorns. You'll discover how birds learned to fly, why cats rub against your legs, and a thousand other facts that will make you look at nature in a wonderfully new way.

    Did you know?

    The fastest animal in the world is the peregrine falcon, which reaches speeds of over 200 miles per hours.

    Circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum fooled many when he displayed a "mermaid" carcass that was later proved to be monkey bones sewed together with the body of a fish.

    Discovered in a remote volcanic crater in New Guinea, the Bosavi wolly rat grows to the size of a cat.

    President Andrew Jackson bought an African gray parrot to keep his wife company. The bird outlived them both and was removed from Jackson's funeral for cussing in both English and Spanish.

    A to Z: From Aardvark to Zooplankton!

    For all ages!

    Includes 289 illustrations!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 16, 2013
    ISBN9780062087461
    Unavailable
    The Big, Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures
    Author

    Michael Largo

    Michael Largo is the author of The Big, Bad Book of Beasts; God's Lunatics; Genius and Heroin; and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, as well as three novels. He and his family live in Florida with their dog, two turtles, a parrot, two canaries, and a tank of fish.

    Read more from Michael Largo

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    Reviews for The Big, Bad Book of Beasts

    4/5

    7 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It was quick to read and the beasts mentioned in it were really interesting. I'm a sucker for the strange and unusual so this book really appealed to that side of me. I would love to purchase a copy of the book to have on my own book shelves simply because it is so bizarre. With the bizarre is mystery and reading about animals that may or may not have existed that are just down right peculiar is really fun.

      In amongst the bizarre animals mentioned there were also animals that we know and love (or maybe even hate) today. For example, this book spoke of animals such as the Albatross, the ant, the capybara (all of which are still in existence today). It also mentioned that P.T. Barnum (the circus ringmaster) created a mermaid out of monkey bones to fool his audiences.

      This book is based on the medieval encyclopaedias called beasteries so therefore we get a little insight into an era far beyond our reach today.

      What more can I say other than I believe this book would be a great addition to anyone's home library purely because its contents marries the bizarre with the 'normal' so well.
    • 4/5
      I have no idea how Largo picked the animals that he put in the book. It runs from ants and bears to extinct animals like the dodo and the tyrannosaurus rex, there are myths and legends like the phoenix and trolls and cryptids like the chupacabra and the Jersey devil. There is a little bit of everything. There are animals I am familiar with and ones I have never heard of before. I learned a lot of new things even about the animals I thought I knew well. You get from a few paragraphs to a few pages about each animal. There is information like life span and habitat and more specific information like how many times a woodpecker will bang his head against a tree in one day. He explores were myths about animals (even real ones) started and what animal might have been misidentified to start rumors of nonexistent animals. If you are doing some kind of research I don’t know how much this would help you. But if you just like to learn about animals it is a great book to visit off and on and read an entry or two.