Biology Books

The promises of potions or techniques to achieve longevity have been with us since time immemorial, the outlandishness of some claims matched only by our willingness to believe them. And, yet, today's scientific research does give some clues on how to live longer and healthier lives. Biologist Steven Austad, Distinguished Professor and Endowed Chair in Healthy Aging Research at the University of Alabama, recommends a range of books that give insight into longevity.

Menstruation is a natural process that will happen some 400 times in a woman's life, and yet it still causes embarrassment. Biological anthropologist Kate Clancy, author of Period: The Real Story of Menstruation, recommends books that shed light not only on periods, but on how to make the world a better place.

Palaeontologist and dinosaur specialist Paul Barrett says many of the 1,200 known species of dinosaur were far more complex than we once thought. Some were brightly feathered, many were at least partly warm-blooded

Birds are everywhere. They capture our imagination and make us wish that we, too, could soar away. Jonathan Elphick eloquently recommends the best books on the wonders of birds.

Thanks to scientific advances, we're finding out more and more about prehistoric people, including women and their lives during the Upper Paleolithic era. French filmmaker Thomas Cirotteau, director of the documentary and co-author of a book about Lady Sapiens, recommends books to find out more about our female ancestors, who while separated from us by tens of thousands of years, have been brought tantalizingly close by new techniques and discoveries.

Palaeontologist Richard Fortey says it took tiny organisms two billion years of work to oxygenate the planet sufficiently for our kind of life, including trilobites, dinosaurs and ourselves, to evolve

Internationally known ecologist says plants are grievously overlooked, because no life on earth would exist without them - essential reading on plants

It's fashionable today to liken humans to animals but the developmental psychologist says it's more interesting to study the ways in which we're remarkably different from other creatures

Humanity has a long history of keeping bees. But what do we really know about them? Beekeeping memoirist Helen Jukes selects five books that examine both the behaviour of bees as individuals and colonies as 'superorganisms.'

Insects outnumber us, outweigh us, and without them ecosystems would collapse. In short, we live on their planet. The entomologist explains why we should value bugs more – even, or especially, the carrion beetles and dung feeders