The rhyming text follows a lone tumbleweed in its journey across a desert teeming with life.

"Welcome to life in the desert! Young readers will learn all about the desert environment where the collared lizard lives, as well as its physical characteristics, what it eats, and how it survives in its hot, dry home."--

"Young readers will learn all about the desert environment where the bark scorpion lives, as well as its physical characteristics, what it eats, and how it survives in its hot, dry home."--

"Spend a day and night in the desert! Learn about this dry habitat through the unique animals that call it home. Stand with meerkats during a watchful hunt for insects. Spot a jackrabbit taking a shaded midday nap. Join a desert tortoise as it dines on colorful cactus fruit. After dark, follow a snake as it slithers in cool, moonlit sand. What will tomorrow bring in the desert?"--

Along a tiny spring in a narrow canyon near Death Valley, seemingly against all odds, an Inyo Mountain slender salamander makes its home. "The desert," writes conservation biologist Christopher Norment, "is defined by the absence of water, and yet in the desert there is water enough, if you live properly." Relicts of a Beautiful Sea explores the existence of rare, unexpected, and sublime desert creatures such as the black toad and four pupfishes unique...