Lifetime: The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives

The concepts of counting and quantity are cleverly examined in the context of animal lives. Schaefer presents the number of times an animal "performs one behavior or grows one feature" in its lifetime, starting with the single egg sac spun by a spider, moving through double-digit features such as the twenty fleeces produced by an alpaca, and up to the thousand babies carried by a male seahorse. Bold, beautifully composed, and somewhat retro (reminiscent of his art in Over and Under the Snow, rev. 1/12), Neal's block print - like mixed-media illustrations of the eleven animals featured contain the actual number of items on each double-page spread--industrious readers can count every one of the 550 sharply defined alligator eggs or the nine hundred flowers a swallowtail visits. Significant supplemental information can be found after the main text, including scientific names and additional numerical facts about each animal, a discussion of the concept of average, and word problems to think about the mathematics behind calculating some of these numbers. danielle j. ford