Beasts of Eden : Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution

I think the biggest disappointment I had with this book was the lack of pictures. Sure, partly my fault because I didn't notice that there were only 18 black and white illustrations, but when a book uses two very famous murals as a starting point and then doesn't have 1 color picture of the murals, I am disappointed. The pictures from the Age of Mammals were muddy at best. The writing was average. Wallace is no stylist but he is a solid writer conveying technical information. I picked up this book after I read an article on Buffon in Natural History so I was surprised at how Wallace treated him. Now I need to know more about Buffon to see which representation is more accurate. The book is a couple of years old but the only thing I noticed was the comment that mammals were small and rat-like during the Age of Reptiles. Within the past 2 years there have been several large mammal species discovered which co-existed with the dinosaurs. Although not megafauna, they were over three feet in length and preyed on dinosaurs. Mammals first evolved at about the same time as dinosaurs, and their story is perhaps the more fascinating of the two—in part because it is also our own story. In this literate and entertaining book, eminent naturalist David Rains Wallace brings the saga of ancient mammals to a general audience for the first time. Using artist Rudolph Zallinger's majestic The Age of Mammals mural at the Peabody Museum as a frame for his narrative, Wallace deftly moves over varied terrain—drawing from history, science, evolutionary theory, and art history—to present a lively account of fossil discoveries and an overview of what those discoveries have revealed about early mammals and their evolution. In these pages we encounter towering mammoths, tiny horses, giant-clawed ground sloths, whales with legs, uintatheres, zhelestids, and other exotic extinct creatures as well as the scientists who discovered and wondered about their remains. We meet such memorable figures as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Edward D. Cope, George Gaylord Simpson, and Stephen Jay Gould and learn of their heated disputes, from Cuvier's and Owen's fights with early evolutionists to present controversies over the Late Cretaceous mass extinction. Wallace's own lifelong interest in evolution is reflected in the book's evocative and engaging style and in the personal experiences he expertly weaves into the tale, providing an altogether expansive perspective on what Darwin described as the'grandeur'of evolution. Annotation A General Interest Exploration Of Mammal Evolution And The Scientific History Of Major Fossil Discoveries, Their Discoverers, And Changing Ideas About These Extinct Beasts.it's Both A Grand Mystery And A Cinderella Story: Mammal Origins Were One Of 19th-century Science's Major Enigmas, And Mammals Outlasted The More Abundant Dinosaurs To Give Birth To Us. Prologue: The Fresco And The Fossil -- Pachyderms In The Catacombs -- Dr. Jekyll And The Stonesfield Jaws -- The Origin Of Mammals -- The Noblest Conquest -- Terrible Horns And Heavy Feet -- Mr. Megatherium Versus Professor Mylodon -- Fire Beasts Of The Antipodes -- Titans On Parade -- Five-toed Horses And Missing Links -- The Invisible Dawn Man -- A Bonaparte Of Beasts -- Love And Theory -- Simpson's Cynodont-to-smilodon Synthesis -- Shifting Ground -- Dissolving Ancestries -- Exploding Faunas -- The Revenge Of The Shell Hunters -- Simpson Redivivus -- Winds Thieves Of The Kyzylkum -- The Serpent's Offering -- Anthropoid Leapfrog -- Epilogue: Cenozoic Parks. David Rains Wallace. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 297-314) And Index. THE MOST STRIKING FIGURE IN the Peabody's Age of Mammals comes toward the end, among the Ice Age's brilliant foliage.