Last week I was busy looking for birthday presents and I picked up this amazing book and immediately added to my shopping thinking it could be a present for my son.

But when I got home and showed it to my husband he was so impressed with the book that he said we could not keep it packed away for 2 months we needed to give it to the kids immediately.

We did and my son loves it.  As soon as he saw the book he started reading and reciting animal facts to me.

Now I must say straight away both my kids love learning about animals and we already have a number of good quality animal books in our house.  So any new animal book that we buy needs to be one that ADDS to their already impressive knowledge of animal facts.  It CAN NOT be a basic animal book – we are past those, it needs to be detailed and full of unusual facts to hold our interest.

So the fact that this book impressed my husband so much that he did not want to wait to give it to the kids really does SAY a lot about it.

This book is BIG and HEAVY – really Heavy so please don’t think it is something you are going to pack into your backpack and take with you on outings.  It is NOT that.  It is a comprehensive book about nature.  Really it covers a lot.  If you are looking for a book which deals with Nature Science I really think this book is going to have you covered.

Let me give you a breakdown of what is included in this 360 page book (yes 360 pages)

There are 10 main categories

• The Basics of Life
• Microorganisms and Fungi
• Plants
• Invertebrates
• Fish
• Amphibians
• Reptiles
• Birds
• Mammals
• Habitats

We have not had time to read this entire book – although I am more than confident that both my kids will end up reading every single page, but it is going to take some time.  So I can not vouch for everything that is included.  But what we have already looked at has been really good – some pages out of the Mammal section about Hierarchy, Pack Hunting, Insect eaters oh and some really impressive skeleton pictures and explanations of how certain animals are built and move.

The explanations are concise and the photographs are stunning, and I really do mean stunning, they are incredible close-ups which show amazing details.

The illustrations included are clear and really well explained.  My seven-year old has been reading it by himself and understanding it  (but I must clarify that he is a good reader and he has a very good knowledge about animals).

I have paged through the invertebrates section and I am thrilled with it as I wanted to cover this in more detail with my daughter.

Also I am very happy with the Plant pages that I have looked it – I have felt for some time that we needed to spent more time on plants and I really think this is going to do just that.

I do want to say that the first category – The Basics of Life does include 2 pages on evolution (I know not everyone likes this) but it also includes pages on cells and DNA and a lovely classification tree.

This book really is a brilliant book.  I bought ours at £12 but I have seen it advertised at prices between £14 – £20.  Personally for our family and my kids area of interest I would have been more than happy to pay £20 for this.

I bought this copy of the book at a local store near us but you can also get it from Amazon  – Explanatorium of Nature

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