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Title: Before the Indians by Björn Kurtén ISBN: 0-231-06583-3 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the better books on Ice Age animals
Comment: Dr. Kurten's status as the pre-eminent expert on Ice Age megafauna is unchallenged. One of the most fortunate facets of this professor's expertise is his ability to transmit the fruits of that vast knowledge to his readers in a lively, interesting, easily readable, and well-organized fashion. This book is an apt example. Without overwhelming the reader by overuse of taxonomic names, statistics, or anatomical terms, Dr. Kurten offers a novel view of the Ice Age animals that dominated North America before the coming of man.
Rather than preceding along anatomical or taxonomic lines, Dr. Kurten moves forward through time, beginning in the Pliocene epoch that immediately preceded the Quaternary period. Dr. Kurten divides the time period by use of the Blancan, Irvingtonian and Rancho LaBrean periods, rather than through more traditional European time periods. By use of these American-based dividing lines, he is enabled to discuss not only individual North American species, but how the American animal community evolved and prospered into one like the world has never seen.
The reader is not only treated to discussions about familiar animals such as the sabertoothed cat, and the mammoth, but can be exposed to and learn about such creatures as the scimitar cat, the Florida cave bear, the American camel, zebra and lion,
and giant extinct condors, among many others. You will learn about the evolution of bison, and about the many animals that migrated to the Americas from Eurasia over the exposed Bering Straits during the height of the Ice Age.
The book is unendingly fascinating, and one wishes he or she could be transported in time back to the day when these now-departed creatures made the American plains and forests teem with life. I recommend this book very highly to all, especially high schoolers with a little scientific background.
Rating: 5
Summary: Evokes a sense of North America's (recently) lost Serengeti
Comment: Kurten at al have described the wonderful variety of large mammals that lived in North America for millions of years, until as recently as 13,000 years ago. Saber- and scimitar-toothed cats, camels, sloths, mastodons, lions, cheetahs and other animals combined to make North America a teeming home to large game more diverse than Africa now has. Many fine illustrations accompany the text.
The book is well-written, easily accessible to the interested lay person and does not require college level understanding of morphological bone analysis. Having been to southern Africa in 1997, I now cannot drive or hike through rural North America without imaging mammoths, tapirs, bear-sized beavers, one-ton running bears, and glyptodonts coming to the watering holes and browsing and grazing their way across the landscape.
For a comprehensive college-level treatment, see "Quaternary Extinctions," Paul Martin and Richard Klein, editors.
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Title: Ice Age Mammals of North America by Ian Lange, illustrator Dorothy S. Norton ISBN: 0878424032 Publisher: Mountain Press Publishing Company Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou ISBN: 0226668126 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Mammoths, Sabertooths, and Hominids by Jordi Agusti, Mauricio Anton ISBN: 0231116403 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $41.50 |
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Title: The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives by Mauricio Antón, Alan Turner, F. Clark Howell ISBN: 0231102291 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared by Peter Douglas Ward ISBN: 0387985727 Publisher: Copernicus Books Pub. Date: October, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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