Chasing the Ghost Bat is a collection of 36 essays that have appeared in Scientific American from 1948 to 1999, although most were published in the late 1990s. The essays are grouped in 7 chapters. The first, titled “The Most Dangerous Animals of All,” contains essays on human evolution, as disclosed by fossils, and observations of carnivorous activities by chimpanzees, which include a description of carefully organized hunts by groups of chimps carried out without any detectable communication. The second chapter, “Beasts of the Land,” contains descriptions of extinct marsupials, such as carnivorous kangaroos and leonine marsupials that weighed as much as 260 kg (570 pounds), and the extinct carnivorous terror birds of South America, as well as the still-existing Komodo dragon and shrews, tiny mammals with metabolic rates so high they commonly eat more than 3 times their body weight every day and produce venom more toxic than that of any snake
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