This book introduces readers to the tree of life concept—all living organisms are related and have a place on the tree.

Author Rochelle Strauss uses the tree metaphor to explain how scientists organize life into five kingdoms: monera, fungi, protoctista, plants, and animals. Each kingdom has thousands of species. If each species represented one leaf, there would be roughly 1,750,000 leaves on the tree. An illustrated tree on each kingdom page shows how much of a tree’s canopy a species would take up. All animals combined make up 1,318,000 leaves, for example. Plants make up 270,000 leaves.

While reading about the different branches and leaves of the tree of life, you can also read about some different creatures, such as the coconut crab, find out which animal is the tallest mammal, and how some species are barely hanging on to survival.

I think the book looked really good, but it was even better inside. The topic was great. My favourite part was how they organized it, each branch of the tree is a kingdom and each leaf is a species.

I had a lot of fun reading the book. I really liked the pictures. At the bottom of every page, there was a picture of the Tree of Life with the amount of leaves (species) in that kingdom in yellow. I learned that there are more species of beetles, which are invertebrates, than all of the species of vertebrates. I also learned that the biggest land invertebrate is the coconut crab which weighs 4 kilograms! One of the smallest invertebrates is the tardigrade. It’s smaller than a grain of salt.

I don’t think I would change anything about the book, although more information about each kingdom would have made it better. My overall impression of the book is that it was really good and super-easy to understand. I would recommend it to anybody. I’d give it a score of 10 out of 10. If I had to describe it in one word, I’d say excellent!


(Originally published in the Jan/Feb 2005 issue of YES Mag.)