This picture book is exactly as advertised: a feast of screams, icked-out faces, and wild laughter alongside some serious science. We watched as Extremely Gross Animals traveled with our second-grader from room to room, where she’d plop down, read a paragraph, then come to find an adult to say things like “Did you know, Father, that horned lizards can shoot horrible-tasting blood from pouches just under their eyes?” while the adult was doing things like eating breakfast.

In this inviting, G-rated, easy-to-parse book, animals and their accompanying adaptations are organized in one-paragraph doses by page spread, with headings like “The Scoop on Poop,” “More Spitters,” and “Ew . . . Just Ew!” Each paragraph is accompanied by a photo, sometimes lightly annotated; our younger kid might not have been ready for reading the paragraphs quite yet, but she was delighted to find us around the house, ask us to...

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