WHY DO ELEPHANTS HAVE BIG EARS?

The Caldecott-winning duo offers eye-opening insights into some nonobvious animal behaviors and features.

Nineteen creatures, arranged in no obvious order, strike dignified poses in full-body or partial views here, but readers may be just as taken by the accompanying nature notes. There, the co-authors/illustrators supply several answers to the titular question and a few speculative benefits about zebras’ stripes, for instance; they go on to explain why bats hang upside down and provide credible reasons why wombat poop is cube-shaped and why hippos fling theirs far and wide with their tails. For budding naturalists with a need for further details, the animals are measured for scale by small adjacent silhouettes matched to human ones; fuller accounts of size, weight, diet, and habitat are included in a closing section. Co-author/illustrator Jenkins died in 2021, which may explain why some of the art, such as a rather diaphanous naked mole rat and a sketchy red-eyed tree frog, has an unfinished feel; still, the majestic dromedary, an extreme close-up of a giant squid’s eye, and even a giraffe represented by just a segment of neck are astonishingly realistic and aglow with the presence that marks Jenkins’ best work. A bibliography closes out the work.

Absorbing and enlightening.