Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do

“a lucid and humorous expose of how particular facial features help 25 animals survive.”

The celebrated team of Steve Jenkins and Robin Page (What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?) are in your face with their latest eye-catching animal book. Creature Features offers a lucid and humorous expose of how particular facial features help 25 animals survive.

Jenkins’s bright, playful paper collages fill a full- or double-page spread on each beast and create the impression that it is staring directly at the reader. The natural-sounding dialogue, too, engages the reader by supposing the animal can speak directly to a human. In response to questions a curious reporter might ask, creatures explain with precise, child-friendly language, ranging from the pleasurably gross to the quirky.

One spotlight on a frog, for instance, splays a splotchy golden, green, and brown face across two pages, one globular eye on each. On the left, the question is posed: “Dear horned frog: Your mouth ginormous. Why so big?”

The creature replies: “Well, I like to eat. But I don’t have teeth, so I swallow my prey whole. I’ll gulp down mice, lizards, spiders, insects—just about anything I can fit into my mouth.”

Children will be enthralled with the splendid range of animals displayed throughout this book. Unusual beasts such as the star-nosed mole, the shoebill stork, and the axolotl, as well as more common ones such as the bighorn sheep, giant panda and the pufferfish all get their chance to shine. It’s hard to beat Creature Features for the animal lover on your gift list.

The entertaining text is complemented by the informative final page, which shows silhouettes of the animals to scale, along with details on their diet and maps showing their habitat.