fossils

With their spectacularly enlarged canines, sabertooth cats are among the most popular and recognizable of prehistoric animals, yet it is surprising how little information about them is available for the curious layperson. This book also introduces the reader to other sabertooths that were not cats, such as nimravids, barbourofelids, and thylacosmilids. Some were no taller than a domestic cat, others were larger than a lion, and some were as weird as their names suggest. Sabertooths continue to pose questions even for specialists. What did they look like? How did they use their spectacular canine teeth? And why did they finally go extinct? In this beautifully illustrated book, Mauricio Anton tells their story based on the latest scientific research.

The first major work devoted to the late Cenozoic (Neogene) mammalian biostratigraphy and geochronology of Asia. This volume employs cutting-edge biostratigraphic and geochemical dating methods to map the emergence of mammals across the continent. Written by specialists working in a variety of Asian regions, it uses data from many basins with spectacular fossil records to establish a groundbreaking geochronological framework for the evolution of land mammals. Asia’s violent tectonic history has resulted in some of the world’s most varied topography, and its high mountain ranges and intense monsoon climates have spawned widely diverse environments over time. These geologic conditions profoundly influenced the evolution of Asian mammals and their migration into Europe, Africa, and North America. Focusing on amazing new fossil finds that have redefined Asia’s role in mammalian evolution, this volume synthesizes information from a range of field studies on Asian mammals and biostratigraphy, helping to trace the histories and movements of extinct and extant mammals from various major groups and all northern continents, and providing geologists with a richer understanding of a variety of Asian terrains.

Like the better-known Smilodon, or saber-tooth cat, the scimitar-tooth cats of the New World were fierce predators that killed and consumed the largest of North America’s species. This volume syntheses all currently known information about the scimitar-tooths. Scimitar-tooth cats had serrated teeth that were shorter and stouter than those of Smilodon. Using a mix of new research and previously published accounts, the contributors examine all aspects of the natural history of these extinct cats. They reconstruct what scimitar-tooth cats might have looked like, discuss how they captured and killed prey, and describe their worldwide distribution and how they interacted with other, non-prey animals. Highly detailed descriptions reveal the biology of these cats, provide bone-by-bone comparisons of them to Smilodon and other cat-like carnivores, explain how they originated, and set them in an evolutionary context.

In 1909 a rich accumulation of many thousands of bones was excavated from Mammoth Cave in Australia’s south-west. Many of the bones far exceeded in size any modern-day native mammal, evidence that in prehistoric times giant mammals had roamed the Australian bush.

The uncovering in the mid-1700s of fossilized mastodon bones and teeth at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, signalled the beginning of a great American adventure. The West was opening up and unexplored lands beckoned. Unimagined palaeontological treasures awaited discovery: strange horned mammals, birds with teeth, flying reptiles, gigantic fish, diminutive ancestors of horses and camels, and more than a hundred different kinds of dinosaurs. This exciting book tells the story of the grandest period of fossil discovery in American history, the years from 1750 to 1890.The volume begins with Thomas Jefferson, whose keen interest in the American mastodon led him to champion the study of fossil vertebrates. The book continues with vivid descriptions of the actual work of prospecting for fossils (a pick-axe in one hand, a rifle in the other), and offers enthralling portraits of Joseph Leidy, Ferdinand Hayden, Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh, among other major figures in the development of the science of palaeontology., “The Legacy of the Mastodon” sheds new light on these scientists’ feuds and rivalries, on the connections between fossil studies in Europe and America, and on palaeontology’s contributions to America’s developing national identity.

Univeristy of California Publications in Geological Sciences, V. 146. This work represents an exhaustive review of one of the most important late Cenozoic radiations of Australian marsupials: the short-faced, or sthenurine kangaroos. Sthenurines originated in the Miocene, diversified in the Pliocene, and radiated in the Quaternary to become one of Australiaâs most conspicuous mammal groups, the only lineage of browsing marsupials comparable in diversity to the browsing artiodactyl guilds of other continents. The culmination of 12 yearsâ research, the monograph details the taxonomy of the sthenurines, redescribing each of the six genera (two new) and 26 species (four new), and is amply illustrated with line drawings and more than 100 pages of plates. It presents the first cladistic analysis of sthenurines, and by synthesizing systematic, functional morphological, biochronologic and zoogeographic data, considers the major directions of adaptive change within the group, and the major environmental factors that drove their evolution. It is one of the most comprehensive studies of an extinct marsupial lineage ever made, and should be an essential reference for students of Australian late Cenozoic vertebrates, marsupial evolution, environmental change and Pleistocene extinctions.