I bought this book soon after it was first published back in 2022, so my copy is a first edition hardback. It has a very attractive gold and blue dust cover design featuring an engraving style illustration of a sabre-tooth tiger. I bought it because I’d very much enjoyed Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. It’s a mark of my tsundoku (my ridiculous over purchasing of books) that it’s taken me more than three years to get around to reading it. Brusatte is a paleontologist, currently a professor at Edinburgh University. Both books are available as newly published Folio editions, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to fork out for them.

Somewhat surprisingly considering that one normally thinks of mammals as coming after the dinosaurs, Brusatte describes how the earliest proto-mammals actually diverged from lizards around about the same time as dinosaurs, but while dinosaurs gradually took over all the megafauna niches, mammals stayed small and nocturnal for the triassic, jurassic, and cretaceous, as they gradually developed all the core mammalian features; warm-blood, fur, lactation, and live birth. It was only with the K-T asteroid extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, that mammals were at last able to fulfill their full potential. Very good chapters on the initial rapid radiation and increase in size that followed the mass-extinction and then the eocene hot house period when the main mammal groups of ungulates, primates, and carnivores (dogs and cats) developed. Also fascinating was Brusatte’s discussion of “extreme mammals”, bats and whales. I had no idea that bats are one of the most common mammal groups. I guess because they are nocturnal and like warmer climates that we don’t think of them as common animals here in the UK? Whales are even more fascinating; not least in their sheer size. The Blue Whale is the largest animal that has ever lived on Earth. Interesting that whales first emerged in the warm shallow sea between India and Asia in the period before they collided, and that there are heaps of early whale fossils in the deserts of Egypt from when the Sahara was a shallow sea. Interesting that bats and whales share a similar superpower: echolocation. Throughout Brusatte does a very good job of describing how the changing configuration of the continents and the huge swings in climate drove the dispersal and mixing of all the various groups. Africa and South America were for much of this period island continents cut off from the the combined North American and Eurasian continent, as each with it’s own distinct mammal species. Europe was a paradise of large islands until the ice ages changed everything.

Brusatte is such a good writer. He manages to walk that very difficult line between introducing just enough technical language to make you feel as though you’re learning something from an expert, but without it getting tedious and confusing. His little literary vignettes of scenes captured by fossils are a wonderful device for leading your imagination into the world of millions of years in the past. He’s also good at describing the work of paleontologists and some of the most important personalities, most of whom he seems to know. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. He’s very generous at lionising his contemporaries for their discoveries. If I have any complaint it’s his value laden condemnation of humanity for the massive extinction of megafauna that’s occurred since the ice-age; as if it was the evil intention of some stone age Hitler. They were merely animals following their survival instinct; there’s nothing to condemn there. It makes no more sense than, say, condemning the “evil” asteroid which exterminated the dinosaurs. A sorry symptom of the modern trend for hair-shirt self-recrimination. I’ll excuse Brusatte, because he makes up it by producing what’s otherwise a very enjoyable and educational read.