I have mixed emotions about this book. It starts out with a very good set of chapters introducing Australia’s mammals. It talks about how they developed, how they were found and the constraints that living on a small and mostly desert continent puts on them. That part is almost worth the cost of the book. The rest of the book is a mixed bag from the point of view of the interested non-specialist. It has very good illustrations and lots of them. Some of the species descriptions are written in such a way that an intelligent layperson can get the gist of them. Others probably have something profound to say, but not to the non-specialist. For example: “Distinguishing features of Diprotodon include: its large size; relatively small P3 (compared to the molars); P3 shearing blades which unite to form a horse-shoe shaped crescent open on the buccal side; bilophodont molars without conspicuous midlinks; molar enamel with a rugose, punctuate surface---”

I think almost everyone reading that would join me in saying ‘huh?’ That’s not meant so much as a criticism as a caution. Non-specialists will find parts of this book irritating because they want to find out more about the animals involved, and that information is undoubtedly in there if you can extract it from the jargon it is encased in.

Our knowledge of Australia’s fossil record has improved considerably in the last couple of decades, but there are still rather large gaps. There are a few fossil mammals from the early Cretaceous—between 125 million and 100 million years ago. There is then a gap of over 50 million years.

The next fossils are dated at around 55 million years ago. Many of the species from that era consist only of enigmatic isolated teeth that make it difficult to figure out even which order the animal was from. One of the fossils that can be identified is from a Microbiotherid, an opossum-like critter with a long history in South America which still has one living species there.

The South American connection isn’t surprising. Australia was connected to South America through Antarctica until Australia broke away sometime between 38 million years ago and 45 million years ago. Microbiothere fossils have also been found in Antarctica.

Finally at around 26 million years ago, a reasonably coherent fossil record appears. At that point, ancestors and relatives of the current Australian marsupials can be identified, along with a few lines that became extinct. Australia was going through a warm and wet phase when this first good fossil record was being deposited, and the diversity of species was very high. Australia started to dry out around 15 million years ago, and has gradually been experiencing drier and drier average climate ever since.

One interesting tidbit: the Tasmanian wolf or Thylacine was the last survivor of a surprisingly large and diverse family of carnivores, some of which were somewhat larger than the recently extinct form, and some of which were considerably smaller.

This is a book filled with tantalizing tidbits of information and excellent illustrations mixed in with animal descriptions that are simply not very accessible to the average reader.