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528 pages, Hardcover
First published June 7, 2022
“It was the Age of Dinosaurs, but in the smaller and hidden niches, it was already the Age of Mammals.”There’s something fascinatingly majestic about dinosaurs. Those colossal creatures ruling prehistoric planet, cut down in their prime by an apocalypse from space. Mammals, on the other hand, seem to be getting the short shrift fascination-wise. Yeah, they lucked out and inherited the earth while poor dinosaurs got relegated to chirping in the
“Here paleontologists can gloat: it is only the fossils, and not DNA, that reveal the story of how whales moved into the water. It’s a tale of how Bambi turned into Moby Dick.”But just as I resigned myself to accept that rodent-like creatures are still cool, Brusatte reminded us that mammals are still pretty awesome even if they are not T. rex. The largest living animals - blue whales. The flying mammals - bats who mastered flight in a new way, different from other flying creatures. The majestic elephants thundering through the savanna.
“What many of us—me included, to be honest—don’t often appreciate is that there are many superlative animals alive right now, which share the earth with us. Many of these are mammals. The blue whale is the most extreme of these “extreme mammals.” It is not merely the largest mammal alive today, but the largest living animal, period. Nobody has ever found a fossil of anything bigger, which means that the blue whale is the all-time record holder, the heavyweight champion of the history of the world.
It’s a simple but profound statement that bears repeating: the biggest animal that has ever lived is alive right now. Of all the billions of species that have lived during the billions of years of Earth history, we are among the privileged few that can say such a thing. How glorious is it that we breathe the same air as a blue whale, swim in the same waters, and gaze at the same stars?”
Even if he destroys my mental image of fighting megafauna pretty quickly:
“What this means, perhaps disappointingly, is that saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths were not adversaries. They might have been casual acquaintances, which occasionally met on the fringes of their ranges, where the Mammoth Steppe gave way to more temperate biomes. They were not, however, Batman and the Joker, or Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, or T. rex and Triceratops.”
“It comes down to this: if our human species had not spread around the world, then a lot of the megafauna would still be here. Maybe not all of them, but probably most. Dinosaurs like T. rex and Triceratops were felled by an asteroid. For mammoths and sabertooths, we were the asteroid.”
Steve Brusatte brings extinct and extant mammals to life in his most recent masterpiece. Each story presents Brusattes’ hypotheses in a creative way in imagining what could have led to the downfall or success of a particular species
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The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History From the Shadows of the Dinosaurs to Us is a follow-up to his highly acclaimed bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of their Lost World. While this book is a part of a series, readers do not necessarily have to follow the series to understand the content presented in this book
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In the `Introduction: Our Mammalian Family,’ Brusatte details why mammals are appealing thus providing a strong explanation on why this group was the primary subject. Then, Brusatte focuses our attention on a personal experience he had with one of his graduate students finding her first fossil discovery. The joy and excitement from this discovery is reflective from Brusatte’s account, and these emotions rubbed off on me, causing me to smile. This structure, narratives combined with scientific knowledge and reasoning, is present throughout the book. At the end of the introduction, Brusatte states his goal is telling the story of mammal evolution. I believe he successfully did this as each chapter walks the reader through the mammal evolutionary timeline. Brusatte’s book answers a question I had in the back of my mind, what gave rise to humans (Homo sapiens)?, by describing the mammal groups that existed before and during our existence
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Currently, I am taking a Vertebrate Biology course, and the information presented in this book directly connects to class concepts I have learned as well as increased my awareness of new terms and adaptations. I was inspired by this new information, and this motivated me to explore further by searching for visuals, when not available in the text, and background information from the Internet. For example, Brusatte’s description of aerial hunters’ keen senses to find their prey impressed me, and expanded my knowledge on sensory ecology of the animal kingdom. I appreciated that many of the diagrams in the book had a scale alongside a common object, such as a penny, or metric unit for the reader to understand the size of the fossil collected. While I never had a childhood obsession with dinosaurs, every fossil discovery presented in this book excited me and genuinely piqued my interest in paleontology. Brusatte makes sure the reader understands the significance of these findings in piecing together the mammal evolutionary story by emphasizing its importance
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I liked how Brusatte logically presented information, sometimes even bringing the reader back to points discussed from the previous chapter. The vivid imagery of different traits such as Brusatte’s description of the grating of the upper and lower molars in Cretaceous multituberculates, made my teeth hurt as I read. As Brusatte details different mammal groups and their prominent features, he also shares their connections to humans for the reader to clearly understand these adaptations
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Fortunately, in ‘Chapter 8: Ice Age Mammals,’ Brusatte acknowledges the first people to find and accurately identify mammal fossils in this nation were enslaved people and Native Americans, and how their discoveries helped aid current and past paleontologists' findings
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This book will appeal to anyone who has an interest in mammals or paleontology, especially eager young scientists like myself. I usually steer away from books that are thick in size, but if you have any interest at all on this subject matter, you will find yourself quickly flipping through the pages. Brusatte’s passion for mammals is contagious, and by the end of this book, you will find yourself deeply committed to assisting in the conservation of mammals
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