BOOK REVIEW
Deer Diary: Excerpts from Deer of the World, Images of Animals and Modern Wildlife Painting
Not only in elk, but in large mammals as a whole, ornate head gear is balanced by an ornate rump. That is, as antlers evolve, rump patches and tails coevolve. The elk is the most highly evolved of red deer because is carries the most ornate head and rear poles.
Deer of the World: Their Evolution, Behavior, and Ecology
Valerius Geist
Stackpole Books, $60
[In] the sociobiological analysis of stag and hind behavioral strategies . . . [t]erms such as monopoly, advertising, budgets, efficiency, investment, value, costs, benefits, maximizing, minimizing, winning, losing and the like are pervasive. The justification of economic language . . . is rooted in the evolutionary exigency to reproduce in a competitive environment of limited resources—resources being females for stags and food for hinds.
Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind
Eileen Crist
Temple University Press, $34.95
This watercolor [David Bennett's Roe Deer: Brimham Rocks] . . . has a narrative element that makes it more than a record of a single moment because these deer are clearly sentient animals which have appeared from the forest and are about to disappear into the forest again.
Modern Wildlife Painting
Nicholas Hammond
Yale University Press, $50
About once a month at Sigma Xi headquarters, we liven up the lunch hour with an American Scientist Pizza Lunch talk. In these informal lectures, scientists describe new research to nonscientists. The series is light on jargon but heavy on solid science. Each Pizza Lunch offers an in-depth look at its subject, whether it's bedbugs or the smart grid. Click below to read about and download these talks -- and to subscribe!
