Through a selection of her stunning photographs, Alexandra Morton portrays life on the central British Columbia coast.She arrived in the area in 1984 as a whale researcher, and at first, she was absorbed in studying the orca and admiring the magnificent scenery. It is a coast with a long history: dolphins have pulsed in and out for 10,000 years; First Nations people have lived here for almost as long; European settlers arrived a scant century ago. As time passed, Morton began to observe the lives of other creatures that share the sea and land-humpback whales, bears, salmon, eagles, deer, and humans-and understand how they are all interconnected. As one example, "Bears drag salmon beneath the trees of the forest, feeding the giant plants that shade the river nursery, protect its banks and allow it to make more fish." In "Beyond the Whales," Alexandra explains what is going on beyond the beauty of the images: "One of the joys of watching a place for 20 years is being able to read the signs upon the sea-bubbles on the surface mean tons of herring below; three birds over an orca mean the whale has brought fish to the surface; shearwaters in Blackfish Sound mean autumn is here. The ocean feeds the rivers and the rivers feed the ocean."

'Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.' - The Sunday Times, 'Best Books For Summer' 'In this terrific new book, Steve Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life' - The Times The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They - or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions. In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their - and our - story.

"Rodent Societies "synthesizes and integrates the current state of knowledge about the social behavior of rodents, providing ecological and evolutionary contexts for understanding their societies and highlighting emerging conservation and management strategies to preserve them. It begins with a summary of the evolution, phylogeny, and biogeography of social and nonsocial rodents, providing a historical basis for comparative analyses. Subsequent sections focus on group-living rodents and characterize their reproductive behaviors, life histories and population ecology, genetics, neuroendocrine mechanisms, behavioral development, cognitive processes, communication mechanisms, cooperative and uncooperative behaviors, antipredator strategies, comparative socioecology, diseases, and conservation. Using the highly diverse and well-studied Rodentia as model systems to integrate a variety of research approaches and evolutionary theory into a unifying framework, "Rodent Societies "will appeal to a wide range of disciplines, both as a compendium of current research and as a stimulus for future collaborative and interdisciplinary investigations.