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

I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did, yet I read it cover-to-cover in 24 hours!

The most phenomenal quality of this book is that the author doesn’t start from where we are now and look backwards – that is, he doesn’t just focus on the familiar present-day mammal lineages. Rather, nearly all of the book is tracing mammals (and Mammaliaforms) from their most distant synapsid origins in the Carboniferous up through the present.

The entire world recognizes what mammoths and saber-tooth cats are – we’ve LIVED with them. But what are those other weird-looking animals? The things that look like rhinos with weird antler-horns (Brontotheres). The things that look like camels but with trunks (Macrauchenia). Those rhino-elephant-giraffe mashups (Indricotheres). How about all the vaguely fuzzy stuff from the dinosaur days? These are the stars of this book.

Chapter 1 – Mammal Ancestors – focuses on the split of synapsids and diapsids. We start with pelycosaurs during the Late Carboniferous, and then move into the Permian world of therapsids (such as dicynodonts, dinocephalians, and gorgonopsians).

Chapter 2 – Making a Mammal – focuses on the end-Permian and the Triassic. We especially focus on the cynodonts and how they survived and diversified during the early Mesozoic.

Chapter 3 – Mammals and Dinosaurs – focuses especially on mammal jaw and teeth evolution, and how mammalian mouthparts are so unique. This sets us up for the next chapter.

Chapter 4 – The Mammalian Revolution – flips the script on Mesozoic mammals. Usually this is framed as dinosaurs ruled and kept mammals as small background figures. But the author makes the very convincing case that mammals flourished and diversified during the Cretaceous, but just at small sizes. There were seed-eaters, tree-gliders, fish-predators, a few baby-dino predators, insect-munchers, burrowers. This is when multituberlicates as well as therians emerge. This is also when mammals teeth became even more specialized to grind and shear at the same time. Just as dinosaurs were the reason there were no large mammals, mammals were the reason there were no small dinosaurs.

Chapter 5 – Dinosaurs Die, Mammals Survive – is of course about the K-T extinction. I appreciate that the author correctly points out that nobody REALLY won. Every clade on earth was negatively impacted by the extinction event, and mammals almost went extinct as well – thankfully, they happened to survive. He highlights certain factors that gave them SOME mammals better hand of cards such as small size, diverse food base, widespread, fast growth and reproduction. We also explore some topics such as monotremes and placentas.

Chapter 6 – Mammals Modernize – is about the flowering of more recognizable clades. This is especially about placental mammals. Afrotheria (which today are golden moles, tenrecs, hyraxes, elephants, hyraxes, aardvarks, manatees). Xenarthra (which today are sloths, armadillos, anteaters). Laurasiatherians (which today are carnivorans, bats, everything with a hoof plus whales, pangolins). And Euarchontoglires (which today are lagomporths, rodents, primates). The chapter mainly focuses on the Paleocene and very early Eocene, and aside from those placental clade also includes all sorts of cool oddities such as marsupials, South American ungulates, and brontotheres.

Chapter 7 – Extreme Animals – is basically about the Eocene diversification. Bats, rhinos, elephants, horses, whales, etc. Very neat!

Chapter 8 – Mammals and Climate Change – is about the transition from a hothouse Paleocene/Eocene world to a cooler, grassier Oligocene world. This also includes information about grass evolution as well as the hoofed ruminants, and various predators that also evolved to deal with the new climate.

Chapter 9 – Ice Age Animals – is about the Ice Age climate, how the Ice Ages continue to cycle between glacial and non-glacial periods, and about the fauna of the Ice Age (especially saber-tooth cats and mammoths, which did NOT really live together)

Chapter 10 – Human Animals – is about primates and human evolution.

I appreciate that most of this book is about extinct mammals – as in, the focus is not on relating this to contemporary animals or to human beings. Rather, we are learning about these diverse animals as they were and for their own sake.

I also appreciate the attention to phylogeny. The author explains how different groups diverged, he explains crown and stem groups, he explained some of the distinguishing features, and he often does compare and contrast.

The writing is absolutely solid – I read 400 pages in a day! He has a unique voice that allows him to communicate scientific thinking and terminology in a way that is comprehensible, convincing, and simply fun to read.

There is a phylogeny at the front, as well as a timeline and a few maps. I would have preferred more, but I didn’t feel that this was lacking. The book is filled with illustrations and photos, and I think he included the perfect amount. The bibliography is fantastic because it is annotated – for each chapter, he spends pages and pages explaining what books and papers he used and how you as the reader may want to use it. (NOTE: Do not read Adrienne Mayor, who shows up twice. Her work is bunk).

This is a fantastic book. I learned a lot, the writing is great, and you will enjoy this even if you aren’t typically a science reader.

First, too many species rattled off, assuming you know each one. Too many personal anecdotes, totally irrelevant to the history of mammals. Simple things are unanswered when you are reading. For instance, it is not until page 88 that he admits nobody knows when mammals began bearing live young, even though I looked in the index for the answer by page 45, since it seemed to be an unanswered question. It was a pleasant read, but after reading E.O. Wilson’s tomes on social insects and ants, this book seemed a bit perfunctory and aimed at the mass market, which it is. It is very good in many ways, but I was looking for something a little more technical and thicker. I like big books, not pop market quickies. I appreciate the author’s efforts, but like his work on the dinosaurs, it is too “popular” for me.

Excellent read. Author makes learning interesting and exciting. It was a fast read and seemed more like a fun fiction book but of course it was not. Looking forward to more from him.

This text integrates a very large subject, the entirety of mammalian evolution, in a single volume, using up to date research and sources. In composing a grand narrative it does an excellent job, but the scope of the topic clearly escapes the grasp of this book to handle on anything but a fairly superficial level. In particular, this book is almost entirely text, with only occasional pictures of fossil skeletons or artistic renditions of extinct animals. Critically there are no cladograms to outline relationships between the various groups and there are hardly any diagrams of the critical developments in dentition that characterize the mechanistic understanding of mammal evolution. The result is that many of the organisms and groups mentioned are no more than names.

Overall this book tells a very intriguing story regarding the evolution of mammals, but fails to teach the reader beyond a rather basic outline.

This isn’t an evenings read. Extremely detailed based on a full career digging up and interpreting fossils. Most educational if rather detailed at times. Parts are wonderfully imaginative views of how things must have occurred – sometimes downright poetic.

Un libro bien interesante.

Easy to read and filled with interesting facts. One of the best books in my bookshelf!