You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

informative slow-paced

Now I‘m going to admit, learning about dinosaurs in the previous book was significantly more exciting to me than reading about mammals. But I still took away a lot from this book that made me glad to have picked it up.
Learning outside of an academic context is so fun and I never want to stop. 

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.

A fascinating exploration of how mammals have come to be.
informative medium-paced

Love to hear about my non scaly pals

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

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

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

.

adventurous informative fast-paced
silvvy234's profile picture

silvvy234's review

5.0
informative slow-paced
funny informative reflective tense medium-paced
informative medium-paced
adventurous funny informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Weirdly enough I feel like there is a mammalian bias towards how intelligence is represented. While I agree intelligence and cognitive development played a factor in mammalian evolution. Some of the conclusions feel biased towards to growth of anthropogenic consciousness.