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. Without the author’s accessible writing style I know I would have been overwhelmed by the sheer 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 reads 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. As a result, 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. ( )

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... ( )

Just as good as Brusatte's first book. I'm glad he took an interest in mammals so I could enjoy more of his writing without having to hear about dinosaurs again. Highly recommended. ( )

I loved the Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, and this was just as good. Brusatte knows how to map out a good book about a complex and vast topic so that you never get lost in the weeds. We watch how some mammal characteristics were inherited from reptiles, how the first mammals lived among the dinosaurs, and how they slowly outpaced and survived the dinosaurs through mass extinction events. Fascinating animals are covered here, and honestly, any book that brings up the giant ground sloth is a winner. That thing was nuts. ( )

I listened to this as an audiobook and really enjoyed it. I found it started a bit slow - I don't much care about ancient lizards and other pre-mammals - but then became enthralling. A really quite detailed discussion of teeth should have been tedious, but instead it was fascinating. This was the moment when I could see the "mammalness" of mammals first emerging. From then on, the book offered a well thought-through characterisation of mammals and what has made them successful as a group. Note that by well thought-through I mean that Brusatte has done a good job of identifying which elements will be pertinent and interesting to a lay reader; I'm not congratulating him on the quality of his science, which I am not an expert in.

The writing is fun and light, but also very clear. It's a shame I don't care about dinosaurs, because I'm sure his other book is also well-written.

Also, I've never been able to do this before:
Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous-Paleogene (Paleocene-Eocene-Oligocene)-Neogene(Miocene-Pliocene)-Quaternary(Pleistocene-Holocene) ( )