The Rise and Reign of the Mammals / Steve Brusatte

 

4 out of 5 stars

***100 Days of Summer Reading 2023***

Prompt: Book with an animal on the cover
Virtual 12 sided dice roll: 3

I've previously read Brusatte's book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. As he tells in the beginning of this volume, he was lured into paleontology by dinosaurs, those fearsome extinct creatures that have enraptured generations of children. I was one of those kids, so his dinosaur book was retreading well known territory for me. It was written in an accessible style and I was delighted when I realized that he had penned a similar book about early mammals.

Dinosaur books are numerous and omnipresent. Finding books about early mammals is much more difficult. I remember being excited about Peter Ward's book Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth's History. I was disappointed when it was more a Ward memoir than a treatise on gorgonopsids. There haven't been many others that have crossed my path. This book does address the pelycosaurs, therapsids, and cynodonts, but only in the first hundred pages. I must do some research to find more information on those beasts. I guess it's fair, as this is about “true” mammals, not the ancestral almost-mammals.

All is forgiven, though, for the excellent history of those animals defined by jaw, ear, and tooth structure as capital M Mammals. They start small, fitting themselves into the niches around the dinosaurs. The variety is impressive. I knew that mammal paleontologists had to be very interested in teeth and jaws (because those are the most frequent fossils). I had absolutely no idea of the sheer number of critters I'd never heard of. Or some of the remarkable fossils that have been found. It's a shame that the dinosaurs hog the limelight because their remains are so large and showy.

The cover of this book, understandably, displays the charismatic megafauna. Three lovely mammoths, a sabretooth, a short nosed bear, assorted grazers, and a small group of hominids. The publisher knows what will attract us nerds. And of course the author knows that mammoths and sabretooth cats are the rock stars of fossil mammals, so he provides special coverage of them.

I know that we humans are the egomaniacs of the mammal family, so I was glad that Brussatte devoted only one thin chapter almost at the end of the book to hominins. The paleo-human fossils are almost as well documented as the dinosaurs! I can find more about them elsewhere, but it was a good way to wrap up this volume.