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Journal of Paleontology

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¹ Colorado Museum and Department of Geological Sciences University of Colorado Bruce Curtis Building/MCOL 265 UCB Boulder, Colorado 80309 <Jaelyn.Eberle@colorado.edu>

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Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs. Z. Kielan-Jaworowska, R. L. Cifelli, and Z. Luo. 2004. Columbia University Press, New York, 630 p. $195.00. ISBN 0231119186.

When you left your house this morning, chances are you saw a mammal (at least one!). As a class in Linnaean hierarchy, we mammals are highly successful and diverse; in fact, we are the most conspicuous vertebrates to inhabit today's Earth, with some 4,600 species (Macdonald, 2002). Today's mammals are descended from three major evolutionary lineages—eutherians or placentals, metatherians or marsupials, and the egg-laying monotremes—and are at the tips of the branches of a grand evolutionary tree extending back 220 million years into the early Mesozoic. In their 630-page monograph, Kielan-Jaworowska, Cifelli, and Luo provide a comprehensive examination of current knowledge of Mesozoic mammals based upon a large body of literature ranging from the 1870s to March 2002. Presented in 15 chapters are: an introduction to Mesozoic mammals, their diversification patterns, and history of discovery and study (chap. 1); geological and geographical occurrences (chap. 2); origin of mammals (chap. 3); systematic surveys of the Mesozoic mammal groups ranging from the poorly known Gondwanatheria to the arguably best-known Multituberculata (chaps. 4–14); and an all-encompassing hypothesis on the phylogenetic relationships among the major clades of Mesozoic mammals (chap. 15). Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, illustrations of virtually all genera of Mesozoic mammals flesh out the detailed descriptions. Notably, over a thousand references (>50 pages) attest to the huge effort that went into the compilation and writing . . . [Full Text of this Article]