CREEPY, CRAWLY CATERPILLARS

Introducing the green grappler, the hickory horned devil, the bagworm, and ten other crawlers. This splendid companion to The Big Bug Book (1994) will have budding entomologists poring over the pages. Each spread displays a greatly enlarged, dramatically colored caterpillar; along the bottom of the illustration runs a line of smaller drawings of the stages of growth—egg, caterpillar, pupa, adult moth—often hard to come by in much more difficult books. The accompanying text is precise, informative, but above all, exciting. In a description of anatomy, the author notes that caterpillars can ``twist and turn better than any human acrobat because they have four thousand muscles. Humans have only 670 skeletal muscles.'' Individual descriptions include the details children relish: Tent caterpillar moths have no mouth parts; there are over 800 kinds of bagworms, each building its own style of bag with silk and twigs; and the lily-leaf caterpillar makes a waterproof sleeping bag of a folded leaf. Exemplary. (Picture book/nonfiction. 3+)