Nature and ScienceApril 2025 Recent Releases When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance by Riley Black Science writer Riley Black stuns with a panoramic natural history that acquaints readers with the interactive nature of life among Earth’s plants, animals, and habitats through the eons. Black’s accessible writing “illuminat[es] natural history into sparkling descriptions of what the Earth was like millions of years ago” (Publishers Weekly). Read-alike: A Brief History of Earth by Andrew H. Knoll. Encountering Dragonfly : Notes on the Practice of Re-enchantment by Brooke Williams "Two decades ago, naturalist and environmental writer Brooke Williams had a powerful dream about a dragonfly, a dream that cracked open his world by giving rise to a steady stream of dragonfly encounters in his waking life. In the years since, he has delved deeply into the fascinating biology and natural history of dragonflies and made pilgrimages to see them (he now has 38 species on his life list) while also exploring their symbolic meaning and cross-cultural significance." The urban naturalist : how to make the city your scientific playground by Menno Schilthuizen At a time when the only nature most people get to see is urban, The Urban Naturalist demonstrates that understanding the novel ecosystems around us is our best hope for appreciating and protecting biodiversity. "A manifesto for a new dawn of natural history, practiced by community scientists in their own urban jungle." A Dumb Birds Field Guide to the Worst Birds Ever by Matt Kracht Professional birding amateur and national bestselling author Matt Kracht has had it with these birds! His new book is a warning, a field guide to help you identify and stay away from the absolute worst birds ever to plague planet Earth. Featuring an all-new scientific scale devised by the author that proves how awful birds really are. Featuring fifty of the absolute worst birds to fly the earth, Kracht identifies each of their most terrible qualities, details exactly why they suck, and shows you why with furious (but actually quite lovely) full-color drawings. Including all-new, all-worst fowl, such as:  Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton Debut memoirist Chloe Dalton, a political consultant, spent much of the COVID-19 pandemic raising a baby hare she rescued near her country home. This fascinating, endearing, and rarely domesticated creature became Dalton’s companion for a time, awakening her senses to the natural world around her. For more moving encounters with wildlife, try The Puma Years by Laura Coleman or Alfie & Me by Carl Safina. The Trouble with Ancient DNA: Telling Stories of the Past with Genomic Science by Anna Källén Museology professor Anna Källén’s new book spotlights science done poorly -- in this case, human genetics. Källén claims that much study about ancient humans is based on DNA from fossils that are so deteriorated that less than 10% of the genome is recovered, leading to widespread erroneous assumptions. For other thought-provoking books about fossil DNA, pick up Seven Skeletons by Lydia Pyne or The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak. Latitudes : Encounters With a Changing Planet by Jean McNeil Latitudes is a powerful, innovative book of creative non-fiction that tracks one writer's life-long experience of reckoning with an epoch of heat, as well as posing urgent questions informed by years of writing about climate change and the natural world. What does it feel like to be alive in the Anthropocene? An account of thirty years of living in and writing about some of the world's last remaining wild places, Latitudes ranges across the Antarctic, the Arctic, the savannahs and deserts of Africa, the Southern and Atlantic oceans and the boreal forests of Canada. It combines place-based writing, memoir and travelogue to offer a witness account of the living in and writing about nature, the wilderness and the environment in the Anthropocene. Slither / : How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World by Stephen S. Hall "For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish schoolchildren today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures? In SLITHER, science writer Stephen S. Hall presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yetmagnetic creatures. In each chapter, he explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration. In doing so, he explores not only what neurologically triggers our wary fascination with these limbless creatures, but also how the current generation of snake scientists is using cutting-edge technologies to discover new truths about these evolutionarily ancient creatures-truths that may ultimately affect and enhance human health" Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer Science writer Carl Zimmer puts airborne pathogens under the microscope, taking readers on a tour spanning from the 14th century to COVID-19 that exposes how much we have yet to learn about communicable diseases in the Earth’s atmosphere. Other accessible reads about microbes and disease include The Secret Body by Daniel M. Davis and Immune by Catherine Carver. Contact your librarian for more great books! Rolling Meadows Library 3110 Martin Lane, Rolling Meadows, Illinois 60008 (847) 259-6050 rmlib.org