Junior Library Guild Selection • 2020 Outstanding Science Trade Book, National Science Teachers Association • A CBC/NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book

Natural selection and speciation are all but ignored in children’s nonfiction. To help address this glaring deficiency, award-winning children’s science writer Sneed Collard traveled to the Galapagos Islands to see for himself, where Charles Darwin saw, how new species form. The result is this fascinating story of two species of iguana, one land-based and one marine, both of which developed from a single ancestor that reached the islands millions of years ago. The animals evolved in different directions while living within sight of one another. How is that possible?

Sneed B. Collard III (Missoula, MT) graduated with honors in marine biology from U.C. Berkeley and earned his master’s degree in scientific instrumentation from U.C. Santa Barbara. He is the author of Fire Birds: Valuing Natural Wildfires and Burned Forests (a Junior Library Guild selection); Double Eagle; Shep:Our Most Loyal Dog; Dog Sense; Pocket Babies and Other Amazing Marsupials; and The Prairie Builders: Reconstructing America’s Lost Grasslands (winner of the AAAS/Subaru/Science Books & Films Prize for Excellence in Science Books). The first of his 76 books, Sea Snakes, was published in 1993. In 2006, Sneed received the Washington Post Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award for his body of work.

One Iguana, Two Iguanas