Insects are the most diverse group of organisms in the 3 billion-year history of life on Earth, and the most ecologically dominant animals on land. This book chronicles for the first time the complete evolutionary history of insects: their living diversity, relationships and 400 million years of fossils. Whereas other volumes have focused on either living species or fossils, this is the first comprehensive synthesis of all aspects of insect evolution. The book is illustrated with 955 photo...

No book has changed our understanding of ourselves more than Darwin's Origin of Species. It caused a sensation on its first day of publication in 1859 and went on to become an international bestseller. The idea that living things gradually evolve through natural selection profoundly shocked its Victorian readers, calling into question what had been for many the unshakeable belief that there was a Creator.In this book, Janet Browne, Charles Darwin's foremost biographer, sho...

Beekeeping is a sixteen-billion-dollar-a-year business. But the invaluable honey bee now faces severe threats from diseases, mites, pesticides, and overwork, not to mention the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder, which causes seemingly healthy bees to abandon their hives en masse, never to return. In The Quest for the Perfect Hive, entomologist Gene Kritsky offers a concise, beautifully illustrated history of beekeeping, tracing the evolution of hive design from ancient Egypt to ...

The fascinating and complex evolutionary relationship of the monarch butterfly and the milkweed plantMonarch butterflies are one of nature's most recognizable creatures, known for their bright colors and epic annual migration from the United States and Canada to Mexico. Yet there is much more to the monarch than its distinctive presence and mythic journeying. In Monarchs and Milkweed, Anurag Agrawal presents a vivid investigation into how the monarch butte...

Ants are familiar to every naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, and pest control operator. The identification of the 233 species of Florida ants is technically difficult, and information on Florida ants is dispersed among hundreds of technical journal articles. This book uses detailed and beautiful scientific drawings for convenient identification. To most Florida biologists ants are currently the most inaccessible group of conspicuous and intrusive insects. This book solves the twin probl...

Three major aspects that distinguish this book are that (1) it contains the most detailed analysis of the sexual reproduction (oogenesis, fertilization and embryonic incubation) in a particular phylum of the aquatic invertebrates (Bryozoa) ever made; this analysis is based on an exhaustive review of the literature on that topic published over the last 260 years, as well as extensive original histological, anatomical and morphological data obtained during studies of both extant and extinct ...

This volume 2 and its companion volume 1 present the results of new investigations into the geology, paleontology and paleoecology of the early hominin site of Laetoli in northern Tanzania. The site is one of the most important paleontological and paleoanthropological sites in Africa, worldrenowned for the discovery of fossils of the early hominin Australopithecus afarensis, as well as remarkable trails of its footprints. The first volume provides new evidence on the geology, geochronology...

In the present book the Paleogene fossil record of birds is detailed for the first time on a worldwide scale. I have developed the idea for such a project for several years, and think that it is an appropriate moment to present a summary of our c- rent knowledge of the early evolution of modern birds. Meanwhile not only is there a confusing diversity of fossil taxa, but also significant progress has been made concerning an understanding of the higher-level phylogeny of extant birds. Hypoth...

Entomology as a science of inter-depended branches like molecular entomology, insect biotechnology, has made rapid progress. This also implies that there is an urgent need to manage the available resources. In the past five decades, entomology has taken giant steps ahead. The aim of this work is to integrate perspectives across molecular and biochemistry, physiology, reproduction, developmental biology, molecular evolution, genetics and RNAi applications. This century is proclaimed as the ...

The 2nd edition of this comprehensive book provides one of the most complete overviews of the aquatic beetles in the family Dytiscidae, also known as predaceous diving beetles. Dytiscids constitute one of the largest families of freshwater insects with approximately 4,650 named species that come in a variety of sizes, colors, and habitat affinities. Although dytiscid adults and larvae are ubiquitous throughout a variety of aquatic habitats, and are important predators on other aquatic inve...

This book represents the culmination of the author’s lifetime work on a single fascinating group of insects, the hover wasps, Stenogastrinae. The author explores the biology of these little-known wasps at the threshold of sociality, presenting an ambitious survey of ideas about their evolution and an assessment of the current standing of controversial concepts.Following taxonomic and morphological descriptions, the behaviour, colonial dynamics, social communication and especially t...

Although consensus exists among researchers that birds evolved from coelurosaurian theropods, paleontologists still debate the identification of the group of coelurosaurians that most closely approaches the common ancestor of birds. The last 20 years witnessed the discovery of a wide array of avian-like theropods that has considerably amplified the anatomical disparity among deinonychosaurians, some of which resemble Archaeopteryx more than Deinonychus. Among these newly discovered theropo...