Lifetime: The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives

Lifetime: The Amazing Numbers in Animal Lives is a counting picture book about the quantities a single animal accumulates, produces, or sheds over the course of one life. Its premise is arithmetic rather than narrative: in one lifetime a caribou will shed 10 sets of antlers, a woodpecker will drill 30 roosting holes, a giraffe will wear 200 spots and a seahorse will birth 1,000 babies. Christopher Silas Neal's illustrations show every one of those items, so readers can count along and see what a large number actually looks like. A closing section collects the animal facts behind the artwork and explains the averaging behind the figures, making the book an early introduction to estimation and to the idea of a mathematical average. Lola M. Schaefer's text is brief and rhythmic, and Chronicle Books published the title in 2013.