It is very difficult for any palaeontologist who is not a mammal specialist to keep up with all the wonderful discoveries of fossil mammals over the last decade or so, let alone get any reasonable understanding of the debate over their evolution. A photo of the amazingly well preserved Eomaia scansoria from Dawangzhangzhi in China provides the frontispiece to Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs. This hefty volume might look daunting to the non-expert but is well worth exploring as it is very well structured and indexed so that anyone can soon learn how to use the book. I have been very pleasantly surprised to find out how easy it is to recover information about specific topics, no matter whether it is some seemingly obscure locality (all properly located on maps) or stratigraphic horizon – they are all properly documented in Chapter Two. Chapter Three deals with the ‘Origin of Mammals’ and then the next eleven chapters detail the separate mammalian groups, and the final chapter discusses their interrelationships.

The authors build on the only other general book with similar scope, the 1979 Mesozoic Mammals: The First Two-Thirds of Mammalian History edited by Jason Lillegraven, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska and William Clemens. For authorship of the present volume, only Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska remains from that editorial team. However, Lillegraven and Clemens provide a foreword to the present volume in which they graciously pass the ‘intellectual baton’ on to the new authors. And as they point out, our understanding of Mesozoic mammalian palaeobiology has progressed in leaps and bounds, just like the locomotion of some of the tiny Mesozoic mammals themselves that Kielan-Jaworowska and her Polish–Mongolian colleagues found in Mongolia back in the 1960s. And, as even these experts exclaim, ‘. . . oh-my, have there ever been expansions in the taxonomic detail and biological complexities applied to the understanding of these little animals!’ Indeed, and we should be grateful to the present authors for assisting us through this particular minefield. This is a volume that any self-respecting zoological or palaeontological library should have on its shelves.