A Desert Calling

Life in a Forbidding Landscape

Michael A. Mares

Foreword by Stephen Jay Gould

  • 2003 Oklahoma Book Award in the Nonfiction Category
  • 2002 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award Environment Category

Foreword by Stephen Jay Gould

Prologue

1. The Search for Undiscovered Life

2. The Immortal Animals

3. Elfin Farmers and Cactophylic Carpenters

4. Darkness and the Cave of the Jaguar

5. The Winding Path to Field Biology

6. The Desert at the Bottom of the World

7. Different Actors, Different Scripts

8. Desert in the Sky

9. The Vampire and the Phantoms of All Hallows' Eve

10. Land of the Shah

11. Impenetrable Land of Thorns

12. The Devil's Town

13. In the Shadow of the Pyramids

14. Naming the Anonymous

15. From Howling Wolf Mice to Fairy Armadillos

16. Aridity's Cornucopia

17. Life in the Desert of Salt

18. Land of Diamonds

Epilogue

Appendix. Scientific and Common Names of Species Mentioned in the Text, by Region and Major Category

Selected Readings

Acknowledgments

Index

  • Cover: A Desert Calling

Michael A. Mares is Curator of Mammals and Director of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma.

Stephen Jay Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and Vincent Astor Visiting Professor of Biology at New York University. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, he received innumerable honors and awards and wrote many books, including Ontogeny and Phylogeny and Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (both from Harvard).