The Sierra Club Handbook of Whales and Dolphins

This comprehensive and authoritative guide to the Order Cetacea-whales, dolphins, and porpoises combines exhaustive scholarship and observational experience with a genuine admiration and sense of awe.

Combining over 20 years of expertise, the authors describe every known species with respect to distinctive features, natural history and behaviour, global distribution, and current status of endangerment. Their text is matched with 70 full colour, scientifically precise paintings by the masterful illustrator of marine mammals, Larry Foster, and with more than 130 black-and-white photographs. This unique volume is at once an invaluable field guide for those who wish to search out and identify cetaceans, the most up-to-date compilation of data available, and an extraordinary gallery of cetacean art.

“Larry and Valerie Foster have turned illustrating Cetaceans into a science. They have done literally years of photographic research into the appearance of whales and dolphins. The depictions that they have done are the most anatomically accurate that I have ever seen.” – DR. JAMES G. MEAD, Curator of Marine Mammals, Smithsonian Institution.

STEPHEN LEATHERWOOD is a Senior Staff Biologist with the Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute in San Diego, California.
RANDALL R. REEVES is a Research Associate in the Department of Vertebrate Zoology of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
LArRY FOSTER is one of the world’s preeminent artists concerned with Cetaceans.