What's In A Name? A Crash of Rhinos and Other Wild Animal Groups by Greg Danylshyn

SOME ANIMAL GROUPS HAVE NAMES YOU'VE HEARD.

LIKE A SCHOOL OF FISH OR A FLOCK OF BIRDS.

Some group names are naturals--a band of gorillas, all hanging out together and making music, or a cry of hounds, howling on the chase.

Some are more inventive. For example, who are these guys?

HONKING THEIR HORNS, HURRYING TO ARRIVE,

WITH SUCH POOR EYESIGHT, THEY REALLY SHOULDN'T DRIVE!

It's a crash of bespectacled rhinos in a tangle of fender-bending collisions on the savannah throughway, of course.

And what group of animals might be termed a tower?

Giraffes, of course! They're a one-critter watchtower!

There are teams of hogs,  scrimmaging in the mud,  a run of salmon, streaming upstream, and a committee of vultures, all hunched over their clipboards.

And, of course, a parade of elephants, orderly marching trunk to tail, is a natural.

The fun of animal group names is what Greg Danylshyn's A Crash of Rhinos: and other wild animal groups (Little Simon, 2016) is all about. Artist Stephen Lamp's digital comical illustrations and apt book design (a vertical two-page spread is reserved for the giraffes, of course) make the animal's group names both memorable and humorous.

Pair this one with Betsy Rosenthall's An Ambush of Tigers: A Wild Gathering of Collective Nouns (Millbrook Picture Books) for a double dose of collective creature nouns (see review here).

More Hindquarters Humor: Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo by Ayun Halliday

If you hang around the cages at the zoo,
Watch closely! And you'll learn a thing or two.

From the feathered booty of the cockatoo.
To the hairy haunches of the caribou,

Some are smooth and some are shiny;
Some are swimming in the briny;

No one tries to hide his heinie
At the zoo.

Booties and patooties are big in publishing this spring! Hard on the hindquarters of Michael Black's recent chuckle-athon, Chicken Cheeks (reviewed here on February 10) comes Ayun Halliday's just published Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo, which also celebrates and catalogs the seemingly interminable terminology of the tushie.

There's a rear for every deer,
A caboose for every moose.
Glutes on newts and bandicoots
At the zoo.

Like Black's paean to the posterior, Halliday's text is clever and his rhymes sometimes gleefully surprising, while artist Dan Santate's illustrations are humorous but tasteful as he pictures the varieties of patooties paraded by the population at the zoo.

But Halliday reserves her final derriere description for one particular group of critters whose cans are cannily covered:

In our research, we found just one species who
Keeps its keister clothed in cotton at the zoo
(And in corduroy and polyester too).

Care to guess? It's people just like me and you....
But three cheers for all those heinies at the zoo.