Product Description

The last decades of the twentieth century saw a flowering of knowledge about the behaviour, ecology, and evolution of mammals, including ourselves. This new information is brought together, in highly accessible form, by an international team of scientists led by David Macdonald of Oxford University. Uniquely, the information is both authoritative enough to be used as a serious reference work by professionals and presented clearly and attractively enough to fascinate anyone with an interest in wildlife. The New Encyclopedia of Mammals builds on the success of its first edition, published in 1983, to produce an up to date, authoritative, and hugely readable species by species guide to all the mammals of the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552732 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 961 pages

The Times
'a rare combination of learning, decent writing, and knock-your-eyes out photography'

British Wildlife
'If you are interested in mammals, it will be hard to resist buying this excellent publication'

Irish Times
'an ultimate in natural history books'

Customer Reviews

Impressive, but capable of improvement
Whilst I am very pleased to have this book, I do not wish to give unqualified praise. I think the coverage is unfortunately scanty in some areas, and often says nothing about familiar species.

This is a beautiful book with a lot of lovely pictures and information, and not over-populist in its content. However given the number of mammalian species, there is a limit to what you can cover in 1000 pages, and I think the balance is sometimes unfortunate. It is sometimes said that this encyclopaedia covers all mammalian species, however a great many are found only in a list of names. Entire families are given this treatment. Many other species are covered only with an uninformative three-line one-column entry. The coverage of bats is particularly weak, which is disappointing given that such a large proportion of mammalian species are bats. I have a slimmer encyclopaedia covering all vertebrate animals, which has at least a drawing of and a paragraph describing at least one representative of every mammalian family.

Just because an animal is familiar doesn't mean you will find any information on it. I give two examples. 1. A recent BBC programme on African wild-life spent some time showing Simien Foxes hunting African Mole Rats, a common and unusually large rodent much used as a human food source. It is related to the Bamboo Rat eaten in SE Asia. If you look up the African Mole Rat in the index, you will be referred to the section on Mole-Rats, which is an entirely different group of rodents. When you eventually find it many pages away, there is only a misleading and brief mention. 2. If, like many tourists, you travel to the high Andes of Peru or Bolivia, you will probably see Mountain Viscachas, and very little else. They are much photographed, featured in TV programmes, etc. But you will find no information on this animal beyond its name. However a drawing of the rarely-seen Plains Viscacha is provided.

The taxonomic list of all mammals would be much improved if it had page cross-references to the main section of the book.

Thoroughly comprehensive.
Far more detailed than any other mammalian encyclopaedia that I have come across. It includes many excellent pictures and illustrations, as well as a very usefull size comparison of each animal next to a man.
Information about the state of species populations is given, as is the state of endangerment.
Case study-like articles, about 2 pages in length, provide interesting facts about many of the mammals in the book.
The only caveat, however, is that it did not include humans in the book. We are the only living mammals left out of the book, but should deserve as much as the other great apes for that is what we are.
However, an excellent purchase, and something that I will spend countless hours reading and learning.

A comprehensive, easy to read and gorgeous book
The new encyclopedia of mammals is a pleasant and surprising mix of photographs, illustrations and text that consisely but comprehensively describes every mammal known to man today. The layout is easy to navigate considering the amount of information within the pages and the mix of scientific and layman's information is refreshing as was a diagramatic comparison of physical size rather than just a given measurement.