The Rise and Reign of the Mammals The Rise and Reign of the Mammals

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals

    • 4.1 • 7 Ratings
    • £7.99

    • £7.99

Publisher Description

‘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.

GENRE
Travel & Adventure
NARRATOR
PL
Patrick Lawlor
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
13:25
hr min
RELEASED
2022
9 June
PUBLISHER
Pan Macmillan
SIZE
834.7
MB

Customer Reviews

JamesClissett ,

Where is the PDF?

I don’t think this audiobook includes the PDF which is mentioned at the beginning. It should. Otherwise, this book is (thus far) a 4/5.

JONIX MARK II ,

Interesting

I haven’t listened to this kind of evolution book before, so nothing to compare to. I think it’s very good though. I echo the absence of PDF mentioned by the earlier review. I eventually did locate it on the web address given at the beginning of the audiobook, but it’s still good even if you don’t bother.

Listeners Also Bought

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
2018
A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth A (Very) Short History of Life On Earth
2021
Otherlands Otherlands
2022
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles (Unabridged) The Tyrannosaur Chronicles (Unabridged)
2016
Origins Origins
2019
Tamed Tamed
2018