Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature

Front Cover
Open Road + Grove/Atlantic, Aug 12, 2008 - Nature - 272 pages
The internationally acclaimed author of The Weather Makers crafts a love letter to his native land and one of its most unique inhabitants: the kangaroo.
 
Drawing on three decades of travel, research, and field work, Tim Flannery shows us how the destiny of the extraordinary kangaroo is inseparable from the environment that created it. Along the way he uses encounters with ancient aboriginal cultures, eccentric fossil hunters, farmers, scientists, kangaroo advocates, and kangaroo hunters, to explore how Australia’s deserts and rain forests have shaped human responses to the continent—and how kangaroos have evolved to handle the resulting challenges. Ultimately, Chasing Kangaroos is a captivating blend of memoir, travel, natural history, and evolutionary science—and further proof of Flannery’s “offhand interdisciplinary brilliance” (Entertainment Weekly).
 
“Absorbing, funny, and wonderfully learned.” —Bill Bryson, New York Times–bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods
 

Contents

Vanished Country
A Failed Circumnavigation
Captain Cooks Kangaroo
Quokkas Euros and Stinkers
The Last of the Frontier
Of Nailtails and Nailed Tyres
Kangaroo Essence
Deadend in the Inland
The Oldest Kangaroo
Skeletons in the Dead Centre
Where the Great Roos Came From
The Age of Kangaroos
Advancing with Feet or Stomach?
Grass for the Kangaroos
Not Formed for Such Work
Land of Giants

The Mystery of Hopping
The Brightest Place on Earth
Is the Answer
World Conquest

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2008)

Tim Flannery is one of the most celebrated scientists of our time. His landmark bestseller The Weather Makers, which sold one hundred-fifty thousand copies in America and was translated into twenty-four languages internationally, was embraced by readers and endorsed by policy makers, scientists, and energy industry executives around the world. He is Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and acts as a judge (along with Al Gore, James Hansen, James Lovelock, and Crispin Tickell) for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge. He was named Australian of the Year in 2007 and is a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Bibliographic information