A tour of evolution’s most inventive—and essential—creations: animal genitalia Forget opposable thumbs and canine teeth: the largest anatomical differences between humans and chimps are found below the belt. In Nature’s Nether Regions, ecologist and evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen invites readers to discover the wondrous diversity of animalian reproductive organs. Schilthuizen packs this delightful read with astonishing scientific insights while maintaining an absorbing narrative style reminiscent of Mary Roach and Jerry Coyne. With illustrations throughout and vivid field anecdotes—among them laser surgery on a fruit fly’s privates and a snail orgy—Nature’s Nether Regions is a celebration of life in all shapes and sizes.

Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodivers ity, and Ourselves

Science & Math

Schilthuizen, Menno

Biological Sciences

Penguin Publishing Group

How do new animal and plant species come about? How quickly does it happen? And what are species anyway? Schilthuizen, reputed scientist and journalist, launches into the debate that has baffled biologists ever since Darwin, with tremendous energy and wit. The whole subject leaps to life and its significance for understanding biodiversity comes clear. This is a fascinating read that will appeal equally to the lay reader and to students getting to grips with the fundementals of a complex subject.

Frogs Flies & Dandelions

Oxford University Press M.D.

The earth is home to a wild proliferation of species, millions of life-forms that come in a spectacular--and often bizarre--array of sizes, shapes, and colors. But what triggers this fantastic explosion of life? How does one species split into another? Even Charles Darwin was baffled before such questions, calling them "The Mystery of Mysteries." In this fascinating, witty, and vividly written book, Menno Schilthuizen illuminates these questions, showing how biologists and zoologists over the last two centuries have responded to them, assessing our current knowledge of species, and proposing his own solution to Darwin's mystery. Using the sometimes-vicious academic debates and the powerful personalities of scientists as background, Schilthuizen explores the meandering path of species research and sets it out in the clearest possible terms. From looking at how we define a species, to exploring how geographical isolation and sexual selection contribute to making new species, to showing how species may appear gradually or instantaneously, Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions offers a comprehensive account of this evolutionary drama. Along the way, we get to know a remarkable cast of characters from the plant and animal kingdoms, from the copper-loving monkey flower to sockeye salmon, fire-bellied toads, lyrebirds, apple maggot flies, and many others. Most important, we get a clear picture of all the conditions necessary for one species to give birth to another. Written with engaging panache, and illuminating an area of study intensely relevant to any assessment of the earth's biodiversity, Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions will appeal to everyone--scientist and layperson alike--curious about nature and animal behavior.

Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions: Speciation--The Evolution of New Species

History

Oxford University Press

The Urban Naturalist: How to Make the City Your Scientific Playground

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Exercise & Fitness

The MIT Press

The story of evolution as you’ve never heard it before What’s the easiest way to tell species apart? Check their genitals. Researching private parts was long considered taboo, but scientists are now beginning to understand that the wild diversity of sex organs across species can tell us a lot about evolution. Menno Schilthuizen invites readers to join him as he uncovers the ways the shapes and functions of genitalia have been molded by complex Darwinian struggles: penises that have lost their spines but evolved appendages to displace sperm; female orgasms that select or reject semen from males, in turn subtly modifying the females’ genital shape. We learn why spiders masturbate into miniature webs, discover she dungflies that store sperm from attractive males in their bellies, and see how, when it comes to outlandish appendages and bizarre behaviors, humans are downright boring. Nature’s Nether Regions joyfully demonstrates that the more we learn about the multiform private parts of animals, the more we understand our own unique place in the great diversity of life.

Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves

VIKING

*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts.
*Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete.
*Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic.
How is this happening?
Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be.
With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving.
Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

Picador

From evolutionary biologist Menno Schilthuizen, a book that will make you see yourself and the world around you in an entirely new way 
*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts.
*Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete.
*Europe’s urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heard over the din of traffic.
How is this happening?
Menno Schilthuizen is one of a growing number of “urban ecologists” studying how our manmade environments are accelerating and changing the evolution of the animals and plants around us. In Darwin Comes to Town, he takes us around the world for an up-close look at just how stunningly flexible and swift-moving natural selection can be.
With human populations growing, we’re having an increasing impact on global ecosystems, and nowhere do these impacts overlap as much as they do in cities. The urban environment is about as extreme as it gets, and the wild animals and plants that live side-by-side with us need to adapt to a whole suite of challenging conditions: they must manage in the city’s hotter climate (the “urban heat island”); they need to be able to live either in the semidesert of the tall, rocky, and cavernous structures we call buildings or in the pocket-like oases of city parks (which pose their own dangers, including smog and free-rangingdogs and cats); traffic causes continuous noise, a mist of fine dust particles, and barriers to movement for any animal that cannot fly or burrow; food sources are mainly human-derived. And yet, as Schilthuizen shows, the wildlife sharing these spaces with us is not just surviving, but evolving ways of thriving.
Darwin Comes toTown draws on eye-popping examples of adaptation to share a stunning vision of urban evolution in which humans and wildlife co-exist in a unique harmony. It reveals that evolution can happen far more rapidly than Darwin dreamed, while providing a glimmer of hope that our race toward over population might not take the rest of nature down with us.

Darwin Comes To Town

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Quercus Publishing

Darwin Comes to Town

Hachette

Comme les bêtes: Ce que les animaux nous apprennent de notre sexualité

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Flammarion

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Books by Schilthuizen, Menno