The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

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The story of the emergence of mammals is told with elan in a clear, engaging book – with a nasty sting in the tale for us humans A sweeping and revelatory new history of mammals, illuminating the lost story of the extraordinary family tree that led to us Terrific. ... In one engaging chapter after another, Brusatte takes readers through the long story of the little mammals that took over the world from those tyrannosaurs. It’s a fascinating story, and Brusatte fills it out with plenty of digressions about some of the people who dedicated their time to learning it." — Christian Science Monitor 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. Brusatte brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy (dinosaur) predecessors in a beautifully written book that ranges from armadillos the size of cars to elephants the size of miniature poodles and makes the case for them as creature who as just as engaging as dinosaurs." — Sunday Times (London)

The Rise and Reign of In brief: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way; The Rise and Reign of

Yet the mammal family tree is bristling with jaw-dropping creatures, from Anisodon to the biggest creature that has ever lived – the blue whale.Actually, it was the retreating jungle and the expanding savannas that played a role in the evolution of humans. The human progenitor was probably a little animal that crawled out on tree limbs and learned to reach out and grasp fruit to eat. The survival advantages of having stereo vision prompted the eyes to move from the side to the front of the face. Likewise the advantage of being able to see fruit in color encouraged color vision (not common in other mammals). Retreat of jungles and expansion of savannas encouraged venturing out into the open in an upright position to see over the top of tall grass. The well developed arms and hands enabled the gathering of food. Their skills of hunting and gathering enabled increased food intake which in turn permitted the development of larger brains which in turn led to improved survival skills. Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483). Beginning with the earliest days of our lineage some 325 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the astonishingly diverse range of animals that dominate today’s Earth. Brusatte also brings alive the lost worlds mammals inhabited through time, from ice ages to volcanic catastrophes. Entwined in this story is the detective work he and other scientists have done to piece together our understanding using fossil clues and cutting-edge technology. This book covers the mammalian journey from the evolution of the earliest stem mammals to the Ice Age megafauna, ending with our own hominid development. Other than the fascinating stories about the discovery of the fossils Brusatte describes, I particularly enjoyed the Ernest Thompson Seton-esque tidbits about the hypothetical lives of these animals.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History [PDF] [EPUB] The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History

With the demise of dinosaurs almost 66 million years ago came the flourishing of our branch of the tree of life— mammals.Steve Brusatte's The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, tells the epic story of how our mammalian cousins evolved to fly, walk, swim, and walk on two legs.His enthusiasm and deep knowledge infuse this lively journey of millions of years of evolution with infectious enthusiasm." — Neil Shubin, bestselling author of Your Inner Fish and University of Chicago paleontologist Finally, you might be left wondering how this book compares to Elsa Panciroli's Beasts Before Us which covered early mammal evolution up to the K–Pg extinction. There is overlap here in more than one way; Brusatte co-supervised her PhD project describing the docodont Borealestes from a Scottish fossil. I was therefore mildly surprised that he does not mention her book. There is some inevitable overlap as both books walk through the same groups, though Brusatte provides a fuller picture by covering mammal evolution up to today. Panciroli's book stands out for its fantastic writing, though, so you cannot go wrong by reading them both.A follow-up to the author’s highly successful book on the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. This one is perhaps a smidgeon less enjoyable, but that’s a mere quibble. Like the earlier book it combines being enlightening with being entertaining. The book does bog down occasionally from an excess of detail. So many different species are described and sometimes they seem so similar it's difficult to separate them in your memory. I had to take occasional breaks from reading, to refresh my appetite for Latin names. But Brusatte does a pretty good job of sprinkling in stories -- some true, some imagined -- about his and others' experiences in the field, and about how these mammals might have lived.

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from

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. There are some excellent chapters on proto-mammals, mammals during the time of the dinosaurs and their explosion in diversity after the chicxulub impact. There are details on the evolution of bats, whales, mammoths and the homo lineage, and also on the extinct predecessors of the major mammalian groups of our world.Not to mention the now-extinct megafauna of the last Ice Age. Woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers - all that awesome megafauna that sadly is lost to us now. This story was updated on June 28, 2022, to correct that the hammer and anvil are bones of the middle ear, not inner ear. The epic story of how our mammalian cousins evolved to fly, walk, swim, and walk on two legs . . . [Brusatte's] deep knowledge infuse[s] this lively journey of millions of years of evolution with infectious enthusiasm. It's just as fascinating as his other book 📖. I kept telling different facts to mom as I was going along and showing her the pictures. The history of Whales 🐋 was one of the most fascinating ones to me (I couldn't stop looking at the evolution pictures)