Stephen L. Brusatte

A worthy follow-up to Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. The Rise and Reign of the Mammals goes further back in evolutionary history than the illustration on its cover would suggest. It begins with the diapsid/synapsid split and follows through to the earliest mammaliaforme fossils before introducing the megafauna shown on the cover. If the terms diapsid, synapsid, mammaliaforme and megafauna are new to you, you are not alone.Thankfully the author’s accessible writing style kept me from being overwhelmed by the amount of scientific terminology and detailed information presented here.
The best part of the book turned out to be the Notes on Sources section. It read as if Brusatte’s editor had less sway there and he could really geek out on the minutiae his editor had probably red‑lined from the main body of the book. His enthusiasm is contagious and spills over from his subject – mammals - to the books and publications he used as sources in writing this. So I’ve now taken one title off of my tbr shelf only to replace it with at least three more. I just hope they're half as well written as this is.… (meer)

This is a very readable, colloquial, anecdotal, episodic history of the dinosaurs. This is well told popular science, and although probably a simplification, there are some qualifiers to remind the reader that this is just generally accepted opinion at the moment, which might change due to future discoveries. The story fits the currently available evidence in a convincing manner.
I have read a couple of other books about deep time: Otherlands which was more wide ranging in time and helped me better understand this section of the geological jigsaw puzzle, and The Dinosaur Hunters, which was more a history of the discovery of palaeontology as a science. This book is an exciting read about our current understanding of dinosaur evolution, mass extinction and how birds survived that extinction event to remain the only surviving dinosaurs. Well worth your time and a pleasure to read.… (meer)

A few hundred thousand years after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, a tiny individual primate called Purgatorius died in the Purgatory Hill badlands of Montana. Its tiny fossilized teeth led scientists to conclude that it was the species that broke away from its insect-eating cousins and was the first primate. Much, much earlier, in the Carboniferous period of Paleozoic Era, about 330 million years ago, the first synapsids split apart from their reptilian contemporaries and started the lineage that led to mammals.

These are two salient points in Dr. Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. Brusatte, PhD, is an American Paleontologist who teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The book’s notes identify him as the author of the international bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. The paleontology advisor on the Jurassic World film franchise, Brusatte has named more than fifteen new species, including the tyrannosaur “Pinocchio rex” (Qianzhousaurus), the raptor Zhenyuanlong, and several ancient mammals.

This is a book by a scientist for the general public. It’s conversational, not overloaded with jargon, and personal: he declaims his own take on the state of the science, and peppers his insights with idiosyncratic anecdotes about the principal intrepid scientists whose preceded his own. His reverence for these pioneering specialists — his heroines and heroes — never flags.

If you have an interest in the evolution of mammals, I can’t imagine there is a better book or a better author with whom to start.

https://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-rise-and-reign-of-mammals-by-ste...… (meer)