Eight little piggies Book

Published in 1993, 'Eight Little Piggies' is Stephen Jay Gould's sixth book of collected essays. These essays, besides being full of fascinating natural science facts and history, discuss Gould's horror at the loss of animals around the world for the first time in a section, Part one:

-The Scale of Extinction

The rest of the book follows Gould's usual thematic stories about evolutionary theory and histories of life.

-Odd Bits of Vertebrate Anatomy
-Vox Populi
-Musings
-Human Nature
-Grand Patterns of Evolution
-Revising and Extending Darwin
-Reversals -- Fragments of a Book Not Written

All of these essays appeared in Natural History magazine.

Gould writes about science with verve! He loves including a huge variety of related science factoids and history whether discussing the variety of shapes of dog skulls, fossil discoveries, the methodology of fourteenth-century proto-scientists who came up with creation dates such as October 23, 4004 bce as the date the earth was created, psychological blubbering over nostalgic pasts that never existed, wrong scientific conclusions which were nonetheless important to the discussion of evolution (including Darwin), probability and randomness, evolutionary Trees of Life, and sociobiology, among many interesting subjects.

There is an Index and a Bibliography.

I love these books.