The Princeton Field Guide To Prehistoric Mammals -

Donald R. Prothero

Princeton University Press

2017

242 páginas

8h 4m

ISBN-13: 9780691156828

This book came about when I first saw Greg Paul’s Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2010) and felt that a similar book should be done for fossil mammals. It became a reality when Robert Kirk at Princeton University Press encouraged me to write such a book to complement their existing series of Princeton Field Guides. However, in many ways this book cannot follow the format of Paul’s book. He had only a few hundred species of dinosaurs to discuss; likewise, most field guides to living animals have only a few hundred species to list. By contrast, there are over 5,500 species of living mammals, and many thousands of species of fossil mammals. Most of these are known only from teeth and would not be suitable for the large-scale skeletal reconstructions that Paul did. McKenna and Bell (1997) required over 600 pages just to list all the genera of fossil and living mammals, giving each genus only one or two lines apiece, with no illustrations. In fact, there are more species of fossil rodents (again, largely known from teeth only) than there are of all named and described dinosaurs. In addition, the species-level taxonomy of many fossil mammals is still a mess. There are hundreds of invalid species that no paleontologist takes seriously but have not yet been revised. Clearly the scale and approach of this volume must be different, emphasizing the orders, families, and genera, and focusing on the genera that are known from partial or complete skeletal material, not just teeth. On the other hand, this huge diversity of taxa and abundance of material of fossil mammals gives us the ability to look
at some problems (e.g., detailed patterns of evolution through time, fine-scale biogeography, large population samples that allow statistical analysis and studies of variation and ontogeny) that could not be studied in the much scarcer fossils of dinosaurs. Thus, I will follow the broad format used in Paul’s book and other Princeton Field Guides, but the detailed discussions will reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the mammalian fossil record.