When you say "strange beasts," you probably think of weird monsters that roamed the world in prehistoric times. They were strange, all right, but no stranger than some creatures living today.

At this minute, a lizard with changeable colors is catching insects with the end of a tongue as long as its body. Close to the bottom of a river, a fish is defending itself by jolting its enemies with built-in electric shocks. In the tropics an almost brainless mammal is spending a large part of its life upside down. And in another part of the earth a queer, furry, leathery-beaked animal with poisonous spurs on its hind legs is laying eggs!

These are only a few of the strange beasts you can see in the world today. All of them are very much alive although they may appear too astonishing to be real.

In All About Strange Beasts of the Present, Robert S. Lemmon tells the believe-it-or-not story of many of these extraordinary animals and the changes they are undergoing. For scientists have proved that nearly every living thing is always turning into something a little different or is disappearing entirely.

To read about these strange beasts and to enjoy Rudolf Freund's exciting illustrations is like meeting the oddities of the world's great zoos in their natural habitat.

From the dust jacket