Our Time on Earth

Lily Murray (Author) Lily grew up in the wilds of snowy nowhere, spending much of her time talking to animals and making up stories. She has continued to do this in her adult life, and now writes fiction and non-fiction books for children. Her titles include Dinosaurium, Beneath the Waves and Five Little Chicks.Jesse Hodgson (Illustrator) Jesse Hodgson studied Illustration in Bristol at the University of the West of England. She now lives and works in Bristol, where she has a studio space. She is the author and illustrator of several picture books.Her Illustrations for Pongo received the 'Highly Commended' award in the 2012 Macmillan Children's Book Awards.

A detailed examination of the elastic life spans of animals on Earth.The amount of time that animals have on our planet is interesting but not as interesting as what they do with that time. That's the key takeaway from an exhaustive, but never exhausting, book about how some animals have but a blink of a life span on Earth (one species of adult mayflies only lives five minutes) while others seem to live forever (the immortal jellyfish appears to regenerate to its birth state in a never-ending cycle). To "discover what these amazing animals make of their time on earth," Murray looks beyond animals' lives and deaths to explain how they maximize that time to keep their species going. Some animals, of course, are more fascinating than others, such as the monarch butterfly, whose life span is between two weeks and eight months but in that time makes a continental journey of up to 2,800 miles, exquisitely illustrated and lucidly explained over four pages. While it's curious that humans are not on the list of 27 species covered, there's still an abundance of mind-blowing facts, particularly about the longevity of, say, the Greenland shark (400-year life span) or the glass sponge (11,000 years!).Well-researched text and winning visuals anchor a fascinating look at life spans.