'Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs,
brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors
in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as
creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.' - The Sunday
Times, 'Best Books For Summer' 'In this terrific new book, Steve
Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed
tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life' - The
Times The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to
become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They -
or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the
dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even
further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches
of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features:
hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp
intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a
distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars,
molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies
with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out
of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of
today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But
today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including
the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise
their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give
birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a
once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and
mass extinctions. In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals,
palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and
evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists
whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of
iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which
we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are
aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the
mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking
book, Steve Brusatte tells their - and our - story.
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