The Big, Bad Book of Beasts

The strangest animals on the planet never asked to be famous, but Michael Largo catalogued them anyway. The Big, Bad Book of Beasts is a modern bestiary running from the aardvark to the zonkey, a quirky and fun guide to the world's most curious creatures for every fan of strange fauna.

Medieval bestiaries mixed fact with invention because their authors had never seen the animals. Largo has the opposite problem: the real creatures are so improbable that the facts read like invention. Packed with fascinating facts and lore, the book combines scientific information with the kind of engaging storytelling that made his catalogues of death impossible to put down.

The formula is the same one that powers all of Largo's encyclopedic work. Take a subject everyone thinks they know, weird animals included, do the research nobody else bothered to do, and deliver it illustrated, organized, and just dark enough around the edges to stay interesting.

For readers who collect strange facts the way the aardvark collects ants, this is the natural companion volume to The Big, Bad Book of Botany. The animal kingdom, it turns out, is no more sensible than the garden.