This is terrific popular science in the form of a cultural history of beavers--their alteration of the landscape before human settlement, the symbiotic relationship with early people (who likely learned tree coppicing from seeing willow regrowth and who used already cut wood from beaver dams for fires and building), the appearance of giant beavers in indigenous oral traditions because of seeing fossils, the economic revolution of the Atlantic fur trade, beavers and their ecosystem relationship to water lilies and salmon, even how beaver transformed in the 20th century into obscene slang.