The big book of animals

We know, thanks to Henning Wiesner?s last book, that elks love to cuddle and that ravens are born thieves. But do we also know how animals came to look as they do today?

On 50 big colour charts, Henning Wiesner and Günter Mattei tell the exciting story of today's zoo dwellers and their ancestors. Easy to understand, but always based on hard scientific facts, their book provides information on the behaviour, survival and evolution of animals – how the wild ass turned into the mule, for example, or the moufflon into the common sheep.

The extraordinary feats of our animal relatives are all the more astounding in the age of modern technology: humans would be hard put to fashion a thermo-dynamic tailcoat like the penguin's. A six-month winter sleep, too, might be an attractive option for some of us, but we lack the necessary equipment. The groundhog is much better off in that respect…

So where do we come from and where are we going? This is a question men have pondered for thousands of years. And that's why, at the end of the book, Wiesner examines the most interesting of all animals: the human being.