The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals

A comprehensive guide to the fossil history of mammals, the bulk of which is taken up by a family-by-family breakdown.

With such a wide topic, the coverage, while comprehensive, is necessarily sometimes brief. For example, fossil skunks receive just a couple of sentences, because, frankly, we know almost nothing about fossil skunks, and most of what we do know would be rather dry to recount. Where groups are well known, however, the coverage is thorough (elephants and their kin receive six pages, for instance) and well-written.

In addition to the main coverage, the initial chapter covers some general topics in mammalian palaeontology (it's all in the teeth, you know). At the opposite end, the final chapter covers general themes in mammalian evolution, such as why everything seemed to be so much bigger in the past.

Of course, a book of this sort would not be complete without illustrations, and these occupy about half of the page count, including both photographs and drawings. For what it's worth, a lot of the pictures come from wikipedia (which, let's be honest, is where I get 95% of the pictures for my blog on mammalian biology and evolution). However, there are a number of original ones, too, which are pretty decent, if not quite of the highest calibre, of the likes of, say, Mauricio Anton.

The pictures are also supplemented by a large number of cladograms, showing how different groups are related. It's perhaps slightly unfortunate that these, apparently taken directly from a number of different sources, have no common format, making the arrangement of the book appear rather more haphazard than it actually is.

I found this an excellent survey of mammalian fossil history as a whole. It lacks the depth of books on narrower topics, but easily makes up for that in its thoroughness, giving good coverage to a wide range of prehistoric mammals, many of which tend to be ignored in popular reference books on the subject, especially those in which mammals are sandwiched in as an afterthought to the dinosaurs, because everyone knows that sabretooths and mammoths are cool, but somehow forgets (say) the apatomyids.