Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution

Mammals first evolved at about the same time as dinosaurs, and their story is perhaps the more fascinating of the two-in part because it is also our own story. In this literate and entertaining book, eminent naturalist David Rains Wallace brings the saga of ancient mammals to a general audience for the first time. Using artist Rudolph Zallinger's majestic The Age of Mammals mural at the Peabody Museum as a frame for his narrative, Wallace deftly moves over varied terrain-drawing from history, science, evolutionary theory, and art history-to present a lively account of fossil discoveries and an overview of what those discoveries have revealed about early mammals and their evolution. In these pages we encounter towering mammoths, tiny horses, giant-clawed ground sloths, whales with legs, uintatheres, zhelestids, and other exotic extinct creatures as well as the scientists who discovered and wondered about their remains. We meet such memorable figures as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Edward D. Cope, George Gaylord Simpson, and Stephen Jay Gould and learn of their heated disputes, from Cuvier's and Owen's fights with early evolutionists to present controversies over the Late Cretaceous mass extinction. Wallace's own lifelong interest in evolution is reflected in the book's evocative and engaging style and in the personal experiences he expertly weaves into the tale, providing an altogether expansive perspective on what Darwin described as the "grandeur" of evolution.

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Title of ebook: Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution
ISBN: 9780520939400
parent-ISBN: 9780520237315
Publisher: University of California Press
Internet download file size: 4793 kb
Published: 05-2004
Released online for download: 05-18-2004
Author of eBook: Wallace, David Rains

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BEASTS of EDEN

WALKING WHALES, DAWN HORSES, AND OTHER ENIGMAS OF MAMMAL EVOLUTION

Chapter One

Pachyderms in the Catacombs

THE MOST STRIKING FIGURE IN the Peabody's Age of Mammals comes toward the end, among the Ice Age's brilliant foliage. It is a wooly mammoth, and it takes up most of the wall's height with its rufous bulk, curling tusks, and high-domed cranium. It is the only figure, except for a soaring bird of prey, that extends above the horizon. Unlike the mural's coryphodonts and uintatheres, it is not engaged in a confrontation but gazes forward serenely as though confident of its preeminence. Even the naked pink nostrils at the end of its trunk have a confident air. The entire 60-foot-long painting, with its grandly shifting scenery and dozens of figures, might have been laboring to produce this magnificent and intelligent beast.

Yet if the mammoth implies the culmination of certain valued mammalian qualities, there is another giant beast even nearer to the mural's end that does not. It stands on its hind legs, head slightl ... read full excerpt from Beasts of Eden: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution ebook

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