Book Description
This is a new kind of nature book. Designed for readers of all ages, it is an introduction in combined text and superb photographs to particular group of creatures - in this volume the colourful reptiles and amphibians of New Zealand. The strangest member of this group, an animal found nowhere else on earth, is the tuatara. The tuatara looks like a lizard, but is is not one. It is the only survivor from the age of giant reptiles - the bronchosaurs, the dinosaurs - and it has remained with us for 135 million years practically unchanged: a living example of ancestral reptiles from which we have evolved. No wonder that it should feature so prominently in Maori art and folklore. Mr. Sharell has for many years studied and photographed the tuatara and its distant cousins, New Zealadn's lizards and frogs, and in this book he gives us the fruit of his work. It is at once an authoritative and richly illustrated handbook, and a striking testimony to his conviction that nature study cannot - or should not - be divorced from an appreciation of nature's beauty.
