Strange, Unusual, Gross & Cool Animals (An Animal Planet Book)

Kids are going to Love this book. What kid doesn't want to know about weird, gross and unusual animals. Filled with great photos of each creature and fun facts about each of them. This book can be used for a book report or just for fun reading. While a child will enjoy the grossness and weirdness, they will be learning cool facts too. Well done!

Animal Planet and Time Inc. Books have produced a collection of cool (not to mention, strange, unusual, and gross) animal facts sure to delight any kid.

There are more than 200 photographs in this book that is divided into four different focuses: “Galleries” to explore a theme, “Featured Creature” to spotlight particular extraordinary animals, “Creature Collections” with groups of animals to compare and contrast, and “Macroview,” showing tiny details.

The featured animals are just amazing, and include the blobfish, the deep sea octopod, the ghost octopus ((just discovered in 2016!), the red-lipped batfish, banded gila monster, and as you can tell by the names, a host of unusual creatures. To me, the most amazing animals are those hiding way below us in the ocean, but they also include animals we might hope to see on land (or in some cases, hope not to see….)

I especially love the theme galleries. They include such themes as “Fabulous Feet,” “Vanishing Creatures,” “Squirters and Spitters,” “See-Through Creatures,” and my favorite, “Glow-in-the-Dark Creatures.”

On all of these pages, you learn fascinating facts about what makes these animals so unusual.

The book includes a glossary, annotated links to find out more, and an index.

I really appreciate that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of books benefits the principal partners of R.O.A.R. (Reach Out. Act. Respond) - Animal Planet’s project to help make the world a better place for animals.

Evaluation: This overview of a fascinating topic is sure to inspire kids to seek out further information. The books from Animal Planet (as well as their television series) prove that learning can be fun.

Animal Planet always does a good job. This book is full of fascinating information. The layout is interesting and includes beautiful photographs.

Animal Planet’s Strange, Unusual, Gross, and Cool Animals by Charles Gingha is nifty collection of some of the wildest critters on our wonderful, wonderful planet. I read this book with my cublings, and we all learned tons of new and fascinating facts. The girls and I loved the little poems at the beginning of each section. The boys, not as much. Haha, except my little poet.

There are myriad pictures to engage young eyes (and adult ones too!). They stole my tablet and read it again with das/uncles, especially to share the dragonish creatures and scorpions/spiders. Jonas keeps scorpions and Drake and Charley love dragons.

Some fun facts inside...

*The Darwin's frog- male holds the baby tadpoles in its vocal sac til they become froglets.

*The kakapo- the heaviest parrot. It does not fly, but is a skilled climber with strong feet. It uses its stubby wings for gliding from tree tops.

*The 2016 discovery of a beautiful jelly in the Mariana Trench.

*The lion-mane jelly has a bell 8 ft in diameter and tentacles up to 100 ft long.

🎻🎻🎻🎻🎻 Highly recommended, especially for kids who are wild about animals and nature. Also as an educational tool for middle-graders.

This was a great book to review with the kiddo. Both of us "oohed", "aahed" and"Eewwwwed" our way through it. Cool pictures, fun facts, and a layout that keeps the reader constantly interested. While it definitely has an educational bent, with its Creature Features section and other things, it never comes across as such. Instead it's the type of book that informs while it amuses. It's also great for enhancing with youtube videos. We thought the Riflebird and Batfish sounded so cool we had to look them up! We were also curious enough to want to know more about the Lowland Streaked Tenrec doing stridulation. I was completely grossed out, she was completely fascinated.

The book is laid out in 4 separate sections, but many of the animals in it could easily go in more than one.

Strange: This is the section that could truly fit most of the animals within it. Our favorite Featured Creature was the star-nosed mole, though the Proboscis Monkey was a closer runner up. The Common Potoo had us in stitches, and we simply had to find out more about this strange looking bird! The Frilled Shark had the potential to induce nightmares. Creature Collection: Birds

Unusual: Probably our least favorite section, but still filled with lots of pictures and facts. Our favorite Featured Creature from here was the Coelacanth, basically because anything that can survive that long is flat out awesome. The section on Newly Discovered Creatures was a delight. Creature Collection(s): Marvelous Mammals and Fabulous Feet.

Gross: This collection was perfectly curated, with almost every listed animal or fact being enough to even make an adult wrinkle up their nose in disgust. Our favorite Featured Creature was, oddly enough, not one either of us considered gross at all. That was the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider. Creature Collection: Bugging Out

Cool: Here the Mwanza Flat-Headed Rock Agama takes the day. This little lizard in his Spiderman suit was a delight to see. However, the whole section is worth looking over multiple times. Creature Collections: The Eyes Have It, and Fantastic Frogs.

Overall, this was a book that both of us highly enjoyed, and I can only imagine how much better it is in book format than what we experienced in the e-book version. Great job from Animal Planet, as usual!

This book was brilliant, I loved the layout, the fun facts, excellent photography and I learnt a lot from it. There are some excellent books out there by Animal Planet and this is definitely one of the best I have read - who doesn't want to read about strange, unusual, gross and cool animals. Very highly recommended and wouldn't hesitate to give 5 stars.

This. This is an amazing slick book. And you might think you know about all the cool, and poisonous, and weird creatures out there, but I found creatures I had never heard of, and I like things like this to begin with.

Kids, which this is aimed at, will eat this up and ask for more. Adults will like it to. It even has categories, such as "cool creatures" and see-through creatures and weird eyes, and they are weird eyes to be sure.

This book is 129 pages, but it packs a lot into this. Now granted, this is all superficial stuff, but it is not meant to be great research. It is meant to introduce kids and adults to the world that is out there, of weird and wonderful creatures. And say, if a kid does want to know more about chameleons, then this might be where they discovered them, and then they can get more, deeper books, to find out more.

In other words, this book is an intro drug, to get kids interested in biology, and who knows where it will take them from there.

Highly recommend this to schools, libraries, and home libraries.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

Animal Planet certainly doesn't disappoint with this new book. Kids will be drawn to the cover and continue through each and every page. The creature features give excellent information, as does the glossary. Thank you so much for this advanced look into the world of strange, unusual, gross and cool animals!

The entire family loves this one, such a neat concept.