Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth [Hardcover]

Chris Lavers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312269021 | ISBN-13: 978-0312269029 | Publication Date: March 19, 2001 | Edition: 1st

Why Elephants Have Big Ears is the result of one man's lifelong quest to understand why the creatures of the earth appear and act as they do. In a wry manner and personal tone, Chris Lavers explores and solves some of nature's most challenging evolutionary mysteries, such as why birds are small and plentiful, why rivers and lakes are dominated by the few remaining large reptiles, why most of the large land-dwellers are mammals, and many more.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book might have been titled On the Perfection of Crocodiles. Chris Lavers, a biogeographer at the University of Nottingham, argues that "After 200 million years of hegemonic ecological success, it is time to recognize crocodilians for what they truly are: perhaps the closest approximation to an unsurpassable ecological design in the entire history of tetrapod life." There's a reason, he shows, that "alligators are as tough as old boots": it's not necessarily better to be warm-blooded. "If the warm-blooded condition were inherently superior in the struggle for life, then the world would be crawling with mammal-like and bird-like creatures, whereas in truth it is quite literally crawling with lizards, frogs, snakes, spiders, and beetles." Lavers looks around the animal world and points out that it's full of large warm-blooded creatures and many, many more small cold-blooded ones.

"There is a natural order to tetrapod life on our planet, rooted in the natural ecological talents of different types of animals," Lavers writes. These natural talents come from the fundamental characteristics of different forms and metabolisms: cold-blooded animals like crocodiles can endure starvation far better than warm-blooded creatures, while warm-blooded ones, if properly fueled, can keep going under conditions that stop crocodiles, well, cold. Biologists are used to thinking that energy balances, costs, and benefits are fundamental issues for living creatures, but not of thinking that these issues can be interesting to the general public. Lavers shows that they can be perfectly fascinating: he writes of the peculiarities of elephants, of hot and cold running dinosaurs, of birds on the wing and the ground, with verve and accuracy. This book might be a particularly good choice for dinosaurophiles who are looking to broaden their interests to even larger patterns of life on Earth. --Mary Ellen Curtin

From Publishers Weekly

In this encyclopedic study of the animal kingdom, Lavers demonstrates the truth in his book's epigraph, taken from the German writer (and scientist) Goethe's diary: "How delightful and magnificent a living thing is! How exactly matched to its condition, how true, how intensely being!" Lavers, a lecturer in natural history at the University of Nottingham (England) and contributor to the New Statesman, shows how form is perfectly matched to function in the animal kingdom. After he explains why elephants have stocky legs and long noses and no hair, it gradually becomes clear why they have such large appendages: with relatively little skin surface in proportion to their volume, they have a hard time releasing body heat; the large ears act as ventilators, providing extra surface for the release of excess heat. Dinosaur enthusiasts will enjoy Lavers's take on the cold-blooded vs. warm-blooded debate, in which the claims of warm-blood champion Robert Bakker and his opponents are evaluated on the basis of a detailed understanding of animal anatomy that many other accounts lack. Lavers also explains the importance of layered jungle ecosystems and inland watersheds for large-scale environmental well-being. The book concludes with a frightening but not alarmist warning about the dangers of global warming, which, Lavers shows, probably caused the monumental extinction of almost all life at the end of the Permian period. The writing tends toward the academic from time to time; a little more whimsical conjecture would have added to the book's already considerable appeal. Why wouldn't we ever see a baby elephant fly? Lavers hydroplanes over the underwater world of fish and marine creatures, but perhaps we can expect a future book devoted to it. The drawings of animals here are outstanding. While it will give teenagers a first-rate introduction to natural history, it holds delights for readers of all ages.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (March 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312269021
• ISBN-13: 978-0312269029
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #920,819 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid and readable, June 2, 2001

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth (Hardcover)

Chris Lavers is a paleontologist who specializes in wildlife ecology. It is from this point of view that he presents some of the ideas and controversies of current evolutionary theory along with some of the excitement of recent discoveries and understandings in a popular and nontechnical manner. His readable text is aimed precisely at the educated nonspecialist, but without a hint of any dumbing down.

In the title chapter we learn that elephants pump the warm blood from the interior of their bodies to the array of tubes in their ears to dissipate excess body heat. From this consideration Lavers is led to a discussion of whether dinosaurs were warm blooded or not. The evidence he presents makes it clear to this observer that they were, but his cautious conclusion is that the case hasn't been proven quite yet. Lavers hints that the dinosaurs may have to be put in another category, perhaps somewhere between warm blooded and cold, or maybe even somewhere beyond. How about: "I'm hot-blooded, check it and see" (to reprise a rock lyric).

Lavers goes to considerable depth to demonstrate how much we can learn by combining evidence from the fossil record with what we know about the metabolism of animals and how their bodies work. Dinosaur anatomy, for example, strongly suggests a closer kinship with today's avian world than with the reptilian. Furthermore, the large size of many dinosaurs is inconsistent with cold-bloodedness. Reptiles can't get as big as a Brontosaurus because (for one thing) they would not be able to regulate their temperature. Lavers points out that all the really big animals on earth today, with the exception of the giant tortoises, Komodo dragons and some snakes--and they aren't really that big--are warm-blooded. He cites the arguments of Robert Bakker and others to conclude that T. Rex, for example, wouldn't have the metabolic power to run down prey if it were cold-blooded.

I found Lavers's discussion of the difference between non-oxygen-based metabolic reactions capable of "supercharged" bursts of short-lived energy typical of reptiles, and the sustainable aerobic reactions typical of mammals like dogs and humans very interesting. The quick bursts are those of the sprinter who is wasted after at most a few hundred yards, while the aerobic engine sustains the pace of the long distance runner. Also interesting is the material in the chapter "Life on the Edge" about how birds and mammals maintain their body temperatures in the climate extremes of the deserts and the polar regions of the earth. Lavers notes that in very cold places there are no reptiles.

In some of this I am reminded of the famous and splendid essay by J. B. S. Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," published many decades ago. Lavers presents the same kind of reasoned argument based on physiology and anatomy to demonstrate why animals are built the way they are and why it would be difficult for them to be constructed otherwise. One comes away from the reading with a sense of having learned something important and exciting, a sense of having acquired understanding, not merely a collection of facts.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars interesting and well argued, October 1, 2003

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spacedog "spacedog7" (boston, ma United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth (Hardcover)

answers many evolutionary questions and brings up topics you probably hadn't even thought to ask about. incorporates a lot of paleontological evidence and focuses on the evolution of different groups of animals, as well as on specific species. repeatedly refers back to basic laws of physics to explain various adaptations.

readable in general, although sometimes the text is a little awkward and overly detailed and the footnotes could have been better integrated.

here's a complete rundown of the topics covered:
Ch.1: covers issues with the scaling of areas to volumes, how it affects an animal's leg shape, body size, head size, hair, etc.
Ch.2: the energy costs for cold vs. warm-blood, looks more closely at issues w/ body size
Ch.3: looks at theories about the evolution of warm-bloods
Ch.4: looks at theories about whether or not dinosaurs were cold or warm-blooded
Ch.5: adaptations for animals, including in the tundra and desert
Ch.6: why there are hardly any huge cold-bloods, except in unstable, infertile areas like Australia
Ch.7: why there are hardly any large mammals in freshwater regions, although they exist on land and in the ocean. looks at the success of crocodiles.
Ch.8: why there are many species of birds in general and why there aren't many species of large birds
Ch.9: the catastrophic events that happened when there was global warming and decrease of global biodiversity in a previous era

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Never thought paleontology could be this interesting, March 29, 2003

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why Elephants Have Big Ears: Understanding Patterns of Life on Earth (Hardcover)

This book is an extended essay on the continuity of evolutionary trends. In it, Lavers examines the extremes of the animal world, the very large, the very small, animals that can withstand very hot climes or very cold ones, mammals that fly and birds that run. For each of these beasts, Lavers argues that their shape and special characteristics must have been the result of adaptation to their environment or ecological niche. He investigates not only why elephants have big ears (to cool down their enormous rotund bodies in hot climates), but also why we don't have elephant-sized lizards or birds (at least these days). Throughout the book, Lavers draws on results of research in paleontology. For example, he explains the two sides of the debate about whether dinosaurs were warm blooded, and what the implications would be for giant cold-blooded lizards. I, for one, never really cultivated an interest in dinosaurs before. But after reading this book, it's much more clear to me that the animals we see around us today are just one chapter in the overall life of the planet. The book is written in an informal style, without footnotes, but key sources are identified in endnotes at the back of the book, along with a bibliography containing hundreds of references.