Sneed B. Collard, III

Beaver and Otter Get Along...Sort of is a lovely educational tale about how animals can live in harmony and even benefit their ecosystem using the biological concept of commensalism. A family of beavers love their pond, which they've worked hard to turn from a bedraggled landscape into a thriving wetland. But when a family of otters move in and start...

This fascinating look at thirteen unusual animals, many of them rare or endangered, introduces the remarkable world of monotypic animals—those without any close relatives. One-of-a-kind animals can be as familiar as the platypus or as unfamiliar as the purple frog. These fascinating and mysterious species belong to an exclusive club of living things—those with no close living relatives, making them...

Natural selection and speciation are all but ignored in children's nonfiction. To help address this glaring deficiency, award-winning children's science writer Sneed Collard travelled to the Galapagos Islands to see for himself, where Charles Darwin saw, how new species form. The result is this fascinating story of two species of iguana, one land-based and one marine, both of which developed...

North America's flying squirrels and Australia's sugar gliders notwithstanding, the vast majority of them live in rainforests. Illustrated with arresting photographs, Catching Air takes us around the world to meet these animals, learn why so many gliders live in Southeast Asia, and find out why this gravity-defying ability has evolved in Draco lizards, snakes, and frogs as well as mammals....