After the Dinosaurs: The Age of Mammals (Life of the Past) Hardcover – Download: Adobe Reader, July 13, 2006

A little dull and too much detail in places, but overall a most informative book. It gets into the dinosaurs, of the Mesozoic era, and their demise, except for non-avjan dinosaurs (birds). The author discusses the three debatable reasons for the dinosaurs, and other animals, extinctions: the bolide impact at Chicxalub, the volcanism from the Deccan traos and ses levels dropping.Then it goes into the Tertiary Period and its epochs, starting 65 Ma (million years ago), explaining the plants and animals and climate and geography of the continents and water bodies. Ice ages and greenhouse ages come and go throughout the Tertiary. Animals evolve. Niches are filled by the vacancies of dinosaurs, on land, and huge ocean beasts like mosasaurs and pleisiosaurs in the ocean. During the Eocene Epoch, for instance, a hoofed quadrapedal herbivore migrated into the ocean, changing over millions of years into whales. Early whales had rudimentary hind limbs, which disappeared as whales evolved to what we have today.Horses, camels, rhinos originated in North America. I know from personal experience about rhinos and camels, as I have excavated them in Nebraska in a time horizon bed of about 11 Ma.The Milankovitch cycles of the Earth are covered. They were derived to figure out if the Earth's climate could be correlated with them. There's the 100,000 year eccentricity cycle of our planet's yearly journey around the sun. The orbit is not a circle but an ellipse which varies in its shape. There's also the tilt degree of the Earth, varying from 21.5 to 24.5 over a period of some 41,000 years. Finally there's the precession of the Earth with a cycle of about 21,000 years.The author takes us up into the Hominidae family, which includes our ancestors. The earliest member we know of dates back 6-7 Ma. Tje intermediaries, leading up to our own species, are discussed.The author ends the book with a dire scenario and warning. The Sixth Extinction, he calls it. We humans are over populating the planet, and over exploiting its resources. Forests are being cut down. Pollution is rampant. Animals are going extinct at an alarming rate. The climate could be getting so warm that sea levels will rise by hundreds of meters.An excellent book.

First, I thought the book was very good with a couple of caveats that I mention below. While not a criticism, the book seems targeted to a very small audience - paleontologists and other biologists who aren't experts in the evolution of mammals. From the title you might expect a book kinder to the non-professional. You can get a lot from this book but it took real work for me to finish it. I had my laptop on most of the time while reading so that I could find the information I needed to understand fully the information. Knowing the living orders of mammals (extinct too is even better) is a huge help. I knew about half before starting the book. It is possible to figure out many of the orders just from the text, but you miss a lot I think. The book is very thorough and covers all the continents (except, I think, Antarctica) and the entire span of the Cenozoic (65 my). I especially liked the way that Prothero integrates plate tectonics, ocean currents, climate and paleoecology to explain the determinant factors in mammal evolution in the Cenozoic.The only flaw in my opinion is the near absence of supplemental information that would have made it much easier to take full advantage of all the information in the book. In a book that strongly emphasizes the role of plate tectonics and land bridges in the evolution of mammals, there are only a very few maps. A short glossary and a list of the extinct and living orders of mammals would have been a big help to the lay reader. One aspect of the book I found a little odd was the scorn heaped on his fellow paleontologists who maintain that the K-T boundary event caused a catastrophic extinction of life on earth. Prothero believes the extent of the extinction event is greatly exaggerated. It is apparently still a very emotional debate for many paleontologists.

This is a fascinating topic and the mammals portion is pretty good.BUT - dismissing the impact reality, relegating it to 'well it happened but who cares?' status - flies in the face of the most recent evidence.Yes, benthic creatures survived just fine. Of course. And frogs survived fire and acid rain. But frogs can get under cover for long periods, to get thru the immediate holocaust.The old Deccan traps idea is just that -old. They were bubbling for half a million to 1.5 million years. There is so much evidence that the world changed much, much faster than that!Give this one a miss. When someone gets the stuff I know about this hideously wrong, I just don't trust what they say that I can't verify the accuracy of.

I will admit that this book is a little dry, to say the least. But it is extremely interesting, in depth and informative. The author tries to make it accessible to anyone interested in reading it, and for the most part he succeeds, but it will make a lot more sense and be a lot less weary of a reading experience to someone with a basic geology and some pretty intense biology knowledge. Even lacking that with a dictionary and a encyclopedia App in reach, anyone interested in the subject should be able to get through it quite easily. I'll admit I had both handy. The book itself covers an extremely broad subject area, focusing in a way on mammals, but also covering plants, sea life and the global climate through the ages in general very thoroughly. The sea life especially gets covered in great detail. It also covers the last part of the reign of the dinosaur and covers the different extinction events and theories. It also covers all subsequent extinction events and all the factors and ideas surrounding them. All in all, its a really enjoyable book and I'm glad I picked it up. Its one book I've come across so far that could really just give you a solid basic grasp on what's gone on with our planet since the beginning of the end for the dinosaurs.

At first glance, the book looks daunting to non-scientists. Yes, the familiar shapes of prehistoric mammals are there, in black & white or magnificent color plates - only eight of them I am afraid - but alongside them are pictures of mysterious minuscule sea-creatures and complex diagrams delineating the planet's geological, chemical or climatological evolution. It seems so forbidding.Well, that is before you start reading Mr. Prothero's elaborate yet crystal clear prose. He clearly wrote with the interested non-scientist in mind, since most physical, chemical and evolutionary concepts presented in the text, are meticulously explained and analyzed, in order that everyone, with the least possible background in natural history and biology, can follow the book's thread, namely the extraordinary evolution of life during the Cenozoic Age.The book is vigorously organized, starting with the sweeping events at the end of the Cretaceous and then devoting one chapter per geological Epoch (from the Paleocene onwards) until the present day. Each chapter begins with an examination of geological data, then passes to the climate history of the period and continues with detailed analyses of biological evolutionary events both for Sea and Land. Each ocean and continent gets its' fair share, with the stress put, of course, on mammalian evolution, but since the author recognizes that no living creature develops or lives in a vacuum, he repeatedly stresses the complex network of interconnections between the Earth, the Climate and all Life.Sometimes the reader is subjected to a rapid fire of references to scientific studies, used by Mr. Prothero to strengthen his positions, but it is a local and not often repeated phenomenon, so one's pleasure comes through intact. A very good book for anyone interested in the story of Life on Earth and the Cenozoic in particular.

The dinosaurs are at present unbelievable popular but the period after the dinosaurs and the animals concerned are quite unknown by the general public. Amazing to read about that period and get a better inside. For anybody interested in geology, biology and related subjects this is a must.It also makes you look different at the present extinctions and `climate crisis' hype. In the past increased temperatures always promoted species diversification.

I bought this book with the hope that it might get close in depth of quality as another book by this author, "Evolution." I am pleased to report that this book is equally outstanding.The shear number and variation of species documented in this book, that have evolved or become extinct, makes the mind go dizzy. Thankfully, there are lavish illustrations to accompany the decent sized text, so this book is a real pleasure to read.It doesn't just talk species. The major geological events of 65 million years intersperse the paleantological detail and are clearly explained and relevent.Despite the extra few pounds this book cost compared with the average hardback, it was still an absolute bargain.I now eagerley await the release of "Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs" by the same author.

A good read, well structured, fairly easy for the layman who knows a bit about palaeontology. The chapters take the reader chronologically through all the epochs from the paleocene to the holocene, in each giving details of climate and species abundance (not just mammals, however, but plankton and molluscs as well, which I found a bit wearisome by the end). Given the text presents us with the most up to date information on the evolution of the mammals, why then does it present the reader with (mainly) black and white illustrations, most of which which we've all seen before from earlier publications? Some look like they were produced by children (Fig. 6.22 of desmostylians, the map fig. 6.2B), others are like very poor black and white photocopies from colour illustrations in books I read in my childhood in the 1960s. Some potentially interesting maps are so indistinct (black and white copies of colour originals) that any information on land masses and oceans is virtually lost. The colour illustration on the front cover entices the reader in, only to disappoint with the less than lavish illustrations within. It is very unfortunate that the authors and publishers could not have commissioned at least a few new, colour images of the early mammals for what they describe as a book "useful for the twenty-first century".