Some people collect stamps. Other people collect coins. Carol Otis Hurst's father collected rocks. Nobody ever thought his obsession would amount to anything. They said, "You've got rocks in your head" and "There's no money in rocks." But year after year he kept on collecting, trading, displaying, and labeling his rocks. The Depression forced the family to sell their gas station and their house, but his interest in rocks never wavered. And in the end the science museum he had visited so often realized that a person with rocks in his head was just what was needed.

Anyone who has ever felt a little out of step with the world will identify with this true story of a man who followed his heart and his passion.

Best Books of 1979 (SLJ)
Children's Choices for 1980 (IRA/CBC)
A Reading Rainbow Selection

Price: $6.99

Sometimes it's the imprint of an ancient leaf in a rock. Sometimes it's a woolly mammoth, frozen for thousands of years in the icy ground. Sometimes it's the skeleton of a stegosaurus that has turned to stone.

A fossil is anything that has been preserved, one way or another, that tells about life on Earth. But you can make a fossil, too--something to be discovered a million years from now--and this book will tell you how.

Even though Mount Everest measures 29,028 feet high, it may be growing about two inches a year. A mountain might be thousands of feet high, but it can still grow taller or shorter each year. Mountains are created when the huge plates that make up the earth's outer shell very slowly pull and push against one another. Read and find out about all the different kinds of mountains.

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In 1970, William Steig won the Caldecott Medal for Sylvester and the Magic Pebble--the first of his many Newbery and Caldecott honors. In this donkey's tale, Steig imbues his characteristically simple illustrations of animals sporting human garb with evocative, irresistible, and heartbreakingly vivid emotions. The text is straightforward and the dialogue remarkably touching. Children will feel deeply for Sylvester and his parents, all wishing for the impossible--that the family will one day be reunited. Sylvester's sweet story is one that endures, reminding us all that sometimes what we have is all we really need. (Ages 4 to 8)

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What if we could open up our planet and look inside? From its red-hot core to the highest mountain peak, come see Earth as you've never seen it before in a colorful introduction to the powerful forces shaping our home.

Everybody needs a rock -- at least that's the way this particular rock hound feels about it in presenting her own highly individualistic rules for finding just the right rock for you.

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This is the story of a very old rock.

The "'big rock" is a granite boulder that began as molten rock millions of years ago. Through the ages, the mountains above it wore down, the ocean flooded the region, and then new mountains heaved the rock upward, to the surface of a New York State forest.

Even though the dinosaurs and other living things have come and gone, the rock remains as a survivor of the Ice Age and silent witness to the earth's continuing evolution. Once you know its story, you will never again overlook another rock like this one.