The Rise And Reign Of The Mammals (a New History, From The Shadow Of The Dinosaurs To Us)

By (author) Brusatte Steve
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From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, the story of the mammals, our own kind, from their earliest development and their co-existence with the great lizards to their emergence out of the shadows to dominance of the recent history of our planet.
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‘Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.’ – The Sunday Times, ‘Best Books For Summer’

''In this terrific new book, Steve Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life'' – The Times

The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They – or, more precisely, we – originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years.

Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story.

Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today’s 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young – are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions.

In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of.

For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their – and our – story.

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Terrific . . . a saga on the grandest scale . . . beautifully told . . . Brusatte brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life
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Nothing short of a thriller, revealing the luck, evolutionary twists and near-apocalyptical catastrophes that have led to the mammals of today, us included . . . Fascinating revelations come thick and fast
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Stands out for its brilliant balance of scientific detail and lively, efficient storytelling
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Deeply researched and entertaining . . . Brusatte’s real achievement is to show us that, for all its sheer weight of numbers and impact, Homo sapiens is just ‘a single point, among millions of species over more than 200 million years.
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Gorgeous book . . . fantastic writing, brilliant science.
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Riveting . . . A real page-turner that proves science fact is more amazing than science fiction.
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The epic story of how our mammalian cousins evolved to fly, walk, swim, and walk on two legs . . . [Brusatte''s] deep knowledge infuse[s] this lively journey of million