Michael J. Benton

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Tennessee

The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time

The greatest mass extinction in Earth's history happened some 251 million years ago. In this cataclysm at least 90% of life was killed, both on land and in the sea, almost bringing evolution to a halt.What caused destruction on such an unimaginable scale?Was it the impact of a huge meteorite, or prolonged volcanic eruption in Siberia? In this acclaimed book, newly available in paperback, Michael Benton assembles all the evidence and gives his verdict.

When Life Nearly Died - The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time

a9b7a4f3-7946-4657-a4b2-1b4000038e18-1

Richard Ellis

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

A noted naturalist's fascinating inquiry into the life and death of animal species Just about every species that has ever lived on earth is extinct. The trilobites, which dominated the ocean floors for 300 million years, are gone. The last of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a Mount Everest-sized meteorite that slammed into the earth 65 million years ago. The great flying reptiles are gone, and so are the marine reptiles, some of them larger than a humpback whale. Before humans crossed the Bering land bridge some 15,000 years ago, North America was populated by mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and cave bears. They too are MIA. Passenger pigeons once flew over North America in flocks that numbered in the billions; the last one died in 1914. In this book you will meet creatures that were driven to extinction even more recently, as well as some that were brought back from the brink. You will even encounter animals not known to exist until recently -- an antidote to extinction.

No Turning Back - The Life and Death of Animal Species

4c2d5c88-a84a-45e7-8346-32b17fb39587-1

(J3) #hardcover #fiction #postapocalypse #postapocalyptic #endoftheworld #survival #naturaldisaster #extinction #firstedition #1stedition

Texas

A Novel

From the New York Times bestselling author of the smash hit One Second After series comes 48 Hours, a nail-biting and prescient thriller about a solar storm with the power to destroy the world's electrical infrastructure In 48 hours, the Earth will be hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) from the Sun, a "Carrington Event" that has the power to shut down and possibly destroy the world's electrical infrastructure. To try and prevent permanent damage, everything goes dark prior to the hit: global communications are shut down; hospital emergency generators are disconnected; the entire internet, media broadcasting, and cell phone systems are turned off. Will the world's population successfully defend itself in the wake of the CME, or will mass panic lead to the breakdown of society as we know it? William R. Forstchen is at his best in 48 Hours, a tale of the resilience of American citizens when faced with a crisis.

48 Hours

48862fe2-538a-4ca6-bf4b-bd0cd4dcd706-1

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Maryland

Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

Takes a close-up look at island biogeography, the science of the geographic distribution of life on islands, and its significance in terms of evolution and extinction

The Song of the Dodo

018bbd4b-3f5b-4daa-97c4-a000e1dc4840-1

#hardcover #biology #geology #extinction #naturalhistory #catastrophes 

Several times in the distant past, catastrophic extinctions have swept the Earth, causing more than half of all species--from single-celled organisms to awe-inspiring behemoths--to suddenly vanish and be replaced by new life forms. Today the rich diversity of life on the Earth is again in grave danger--and the cause is not a sudden cataclysmic event but rather humankind's devastation of the environment. Is life on our planet teetering on the brink of another mass extinction? In this absorbing new book, acclaimed paleontologist Peter D. Ward answers this daunting question with a resounding yes.

Elaborating on and updating Ward's previous work, The End of Evolution, Rivers in Time delves into his newest discoveries. The book presents the gripping tale of the author's investigations into the history of life and death on Earth through a series of expeditions that have brought him ever closer to the truth about mass extinctions, past and future. First describing the three previous mass extinctions--those marking the transition from the Permian to the Triassic periods 245 million years ago, the Triassic to the Jurassic 200 million years ago, and the Cretaceous to the Tertiary 65 million years ago--Ward assesses the present devastation in which countless species are coming to the end of their evolution at the hand of that wandering, potentially destructive force called Homo sapiens.

The book takes readers to the Philippine Sea, now eerily empty of life, where only a few decades of catching fish by using dynamite have resulted in eviscerated coral reefs--and a dramatic reduction in the marine life the region can support. Ward travels to Canada's Queen Charlotte Islands to investigate the extinctions that mark the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. He ventures also into the Karoo desert of southern Africa, where some of Earth's earliest land life emerged from the water and stood poised to develop into mammal form, only to be obliterated during the Permian/Triassic extinction.

Rivers of Time provides reason to marvel and mourn, to fear and hope, as it bears stark witness to the urgency of the Earth's present predicament: Ward offers powerful proof that if radical measures are not taken to protect the biodiversity of this planet, much of life as we know it may not survive.

Rivers in Time - The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions

7b8a4ec1-389f-455f-8886-724c831e1a5f-1

#paperback #beforedinosaurs #gorgons #extinction #science

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New York

The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History

Based on more than a decade's research in South Africa's Karoo Desert, this remarkable journey of discovery and real-life adventure deep into Earth's history is offered by a renowned scientist. Photo insert.

Gorgon

d226d8c8-f2dd-404f-9b9b-f5de6c232625-1

Barbara J. Behm

Jean-Christopher Balouet

Deals with the reasons for the number of animal species that have become extinct throughout the world

Indiana

Extinct Wildlife

2a5cd5f3-dd27-470c-83fa-cebba4a30d11-1

Mild wear on top of spine, red dot on bottom edge. mild curl on top of back cover. See photos. 

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Michigan

A Novel (movie Tie-In)

China's runaway bestseller and winner of the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize--now a major motion picture
 
Published in China in 2004, Wolf Totem has sold millions of copies (along with millions more on the black market), outpacing everything except Mao's Little Red Book. The novel draws on the author's experience during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Chen Zhen, a Beijing college student, volunteers to work in China's remote Inner Mongolia region as part of a movement to modernize the countryside. As he admires the balanced lifestyle of the nomadic herdsmen there, he also grows fascinated by the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf. But when government policies threaten the wolves' extinction, he sees an unfolding ecological tragedy--and a parable for China's explosive growth.

Wolf Totem

b2083f58-8b16-4d0b-92b2-8e6a3504d44b-1

James Wesley Rawles

Louisiana

Surviving the Coming Collapse

A tale by the creator of SurvivalBlog.com imagines a world in which a cataclysmic financial crisis prompts a total collapse of American society and forces people to fend for themselves, in a story that follows a group of protagonists who make their way to a shared secure ranch in northern Idaho, where they struggle to survive against violent looting and natural hazards. Original.

Patriots

829af06b-65db-48c8-b881-0ca9d63ecb62-1

#ecology #archaeology #paleontology #wildlife #extinction
Clean, no notes, highlighting

California

Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America

As recently as 11,000 years ago--"near time" to geologists--mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, ground sloths, giant armadillos, native camels and horses, the dire wolf, and many other large mammals roamed North America. In what has become one of science's greatest riddles, these large animals vanished in North and South America around the time humans arrived at the end of the last great ice age. Part paleontological adventure and part memoir, Twilight of the Mammoths presents in detail internationally renowned paleoecologist Paul Martin's widely discussed and debated "overkill" hypothesis to explain these mysterious megafauna extinctions. Taking us from Rampart Cave in the Grand Canyon, where he finds himself "chest deep in sloth dung," to other important fossil sites in Arizona and Chile, Martin's engaging book, written for a wide audience, uncovers our rich evolutionary legacy and shows why he has come to believe that the earliest Americans literally hunted these animals to death.



As he discusses the discoveries that brought him to this hypothesis, Martin relates many colorful stories and gives a rich overview of the field of paleontology as well as his own fascinating career. He explores the ramifications of the overkill hypothesis for similar extinctions worldwide and examines other explanations for the extinctions, including climate change. Martin's visionary thinking about our missing megafauna offers inspiration and a challenge for today's conservation efforts as he speculates on what we might do to remedy this situation--both in our thinking about what is "natural" and in the natural world itself.

Twilight of the Mammoths

2cf186a7-6bc9-4bbd-835c-7cb2ad8f081c-1

#hardcover #nonfiction #animals #climatechange #extinction #sixthextinction 

An Unnatural History

Draws on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists, and other researchers to discuss the five devastating mass extinctions on Earth and predicts the coming of a sixth.

The Sixth Extinction

c5a4ddc4-3961-4d2e-b2f1-6324c8909f03-1

The Ice Lion 

What Killed the Dinosaurs?

Asimov's original work forms the basis for a fascinating mixture of science fact and speculation, combined with a simple prose style. The unique result is a series capable of answering, in an understandable and truly informative way, the multitude of questions children ask when they gaze skyward.

Death from Space

48c88647-4b59-4cb0-b6d7-aff900478ee7-1

#science #extinction #species #scientist #earth

New Jersey

Conservation, de-extinction and the precarious future of wild things 

Resurrection Science 

Lowell Dingus

Timothy Rowe

Dingus/Rowe Dingus

Pennsylvania

Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds

Two crackerjack paleontologists take readers on a brisk tour of the leading theories about the dinosaurs' disappearance. An epic tale of beautiful and terrible beasts and explosions that block out the sun, "The Mistaken Extinction" is a 65-million-year-old evolutionary murder mystery with a fascination that has yet to die out. 300 illustrations.

Mistaken Extinction

199455a2-7ec5-4c81-b740-e585ffbf072b-1

Niles Eldredge

Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinction

THE EXTINCTION OF PLANT AND ANIMAL SPECIES SHOULD GIVE US CAUSE TO PAUSE AND DISCOVER WHY.

The Miner's Canary

595d25f0-f2a3-4d9c-a397-ca2a561187fb-1

North Carolina

Oregon

Dan Flores

Colorado

The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

One of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022

A deep-time history of animals and humans in North America, by the best-selling and award-winning author of Coyote America.


In 1908, near Folsom, New Mexico, a cowboy discovered the remains of a herd of extinct giant bison. By examining flint points embedded in the bones, archeologists later determined that a band of humans had killed and butchered the animals 12,450 years ago. This discovery vastly expanded America's known human history but also revealed the long-standing danger Homo sapiens presented to the continent's evolutionary richness.

Distinguished author Dan Flores's ambitious history chronicles the epoch in which humans and animals have coexisted in the "wild new world" of North America--a place shaped both by its own grand evolutionary forces and by momentous arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Europe. With portraits of iconic creatures such as mammoths, horses, wolves, and bison, Flores describes the evolution and historical ecology of North America like never before.

The arrival of humans precipitated an extraordinary disruption of this teeming environment. Flores treats humans not as a species apart but as a new animal entering two continents that had never seen our likes before. He shows how our long past as carnivorous hunters helped us settle America, initially establishing a coast-to-coast culture that lasted longer than the present United States. But humanity's success had devastating consequences for other creatures. In telling this epic story, Flores traces the origins of today's "Sixth Extinction" to the spread of humans around the world; tracks the story of a hundred centuries of Native America; explains how Old World ideologies precipitated 400 years of market-driven slaughter that devastated so many ancient American species; and explores the decline and miraculous recovery of species in recent decades.

In thrilling narrative style, informed by genomic science, evolutionary biology, and environmental history, Flores celebrates the astonishing bestiary that arose on our continent and introduces the complex human cultures and individuals who hastened its eradication, studied America's animals, and moved heaven and earth to rescue them. Eons in scope and continental in scale, Wild New World is a sweeping yet intimate Big History of the animal-human story in America.

Wild New World

baf1e659-1a04-4b53-8bff-222ed4e040e2-1

Ben Mezrich

The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature

The bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The 37th Parallel tells the fascinating Jurassic Park­-like story of the genetic restoration of an extinct species--the woolly mammoth. "Paced like a thriller...Woolly reanimates history and breathes new life into the narrative of nature" (NPR).

With his "unparalleled" (Booklist, starred review) writing, Ben Mezrich takes us on an exhilarating and true adventure story from the icy terrain of Siberia to the cutting-edge genetic labs of Harvard University. A group of scientists work to make fantasy reality by splicing DNA from frozen woolly mammoth into the DNA of a modern elephant. Will they be able to turn the hybrid cells into a functional embryo and potentially bring the extinct creatures to our modern world?

Along with this team of brilliant scientists, a millionaire plans to build the world's first Pleistocene Park and populate a huge tract of the Siberian tundra with ancient herbivores as a hedge against an environmental ticking time bomb that is hidden deep within the permafrost. More than a story of genetics, this is a thriller illuminating the real-life race against global warming, of the incredible power of modern technology, of the brave fossil hunters who battle polar bears and extreme weather conditions, and the ethical quandary of cloning extinct animals. This "rollercoaster quest for the past and future" (Christian Science Monitor) asks us if we can right the wrongs of our ancestors who hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction and at what cost?

Woolly

a1c6aff7-5e48-4c06-b8fe-7ee049d7cf20-1

Wisconsin

Elizabeth Kolbert

Wendy Muhlhauser

Signed by the author! 

All condition issues photographed. 

Smoke free. 

"In Jelly Beans the cheetah and hope, the unlikely pairing of a sad little girl and a captured cheetah discover how much they share in common when they embark on an adventure in friendship... Set in Tanzania, Africa with the Barabaig tribe, the book encourages youth to identify with the characters as they experience difficulty, persevere, model empathy, and then are shown empathy by the tribe"--Page 4 of cover.

Save this search

Michael J. Benton

When Life Nearly Died - The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time

Richard Ellis

No Turning Back - The Life and Death of Animal Species

William R. Forstchen

48 Hours

David Quammen

The Song of the Dodo

Peter Ward

Rivers in Time - The Search for Clues to Earth's Mass Extinctions

Peter Ward

Gorgon

Barbara J. Behm; Jean-Christopher Balouet

Extinct Wildlife

Jiang Rong; Howard Goldblatt (Translator)

Wolf Totem

James Wesley Rawles

Patriots

Paul S. Martin; Harry W. Greene (Foreword by)

Twilight of the Mammoths

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction

Kathleen O’Neal Gear

The Ice Lion

Isaac Asimov; Greg Walz-Chojnacki; Francis Reddy

Death from Space

M.R. O'Connor

Resurrection Science

Lowell Dingus; Timothy Rowe; Dingus/Rowe Dingus

Mistaken Extinction

Niles Eldredge

The Miner's Canary

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction

Dan Flores

Wild New World

Ben Mezrich

Woolly

Dan Flores

Wild New World

Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction

Sissy Mary Sue

Jelly Beans the Cheetah and Hope