In a career spanning five decades, Frederick Szalay has remained at the forefront of palaeomammalogy. His work has mostly focused on primate origins, the phylogenetic relationships among primates, and metatherian phylogeny and functional morphology. The impact of this huge body of work has by no means been limited to palaeontology. Indeed, Szalay's work can, in part, be regarded as similar in theme and genre to Walter Bock's, the central tenet of which is that detailed examination of function and adaptation allows evolutionary history to be reconstructed. Szalay's attention to detail, his inspirational approach to the documentation of postcranial skeletal anatomy, and his views on the phylogeny and evolutionary history of mammals have inspired a generation of mammalogy students and colleagues. As the editors (Eric J. Sargis and Marian Dagosto) of this new tribute volume note in their preface, some idea of the esteem in which Szalay is held by his colleagues is indicated by the number of taxa named in his honour: there are at least ten, two of which are named in the book.
Eighteen contributions on Szalay's favourite research topics are included. Half of the articles focus on primates, but there are also contributions on ground sloths, tenrecoids, pinnipeds, equids and others. Metatherians are not as well represented as I expected, with only two dedicated papers: one by Brian David and colleagues on new deltatheroidan material from the USA, and a second by Benjamin Kear and colleagues on hindlimb proportions in kangaroos. Bruce Shockey and Federico Anaya discuss the postcranial osteology of the Oligocene mammals from Salla in Bolivia: while not dedicated to metatherians, this article includes some discussion of borhyaenids and paucituberculatans.
As expected, several of the papers concentrate on areas that have been of special controversy or interest within the field of primate origins. In several articles published during the late 1980s and 1990s, K. Christopher Beard proposed that at least some Eocene plesiadapiform primates (particularly paromomyids and micromomyids) were colugo-like ‘mitten-gliders’. This appealing and well argued idea led some workers to re-classify various plesiadapiforms as dermopterans. While the hypothesis that some plesiadapiforms might be ‘mitten-gliders’ has been contested in the technical literature before, Boyer & Bloch provide a highly detailed test of the claim, and show it to be unsupported. In fact, paromomyids and micromomyids appear to have been more similar to extant marmosets than to colugos in manual proportions. Eocene primate diversity also forms the focus of Godinot & Couette's contribution on adapine adapiforms, and of Dagosto et al.'s article on the tibiae from the Chinese Shanghuang fissure-fillings. In addition to adapids and an early tarsier, the Shanghuang assemblage includes various mystery forms that appear to be stem-anthropoids or non-anthropoid haplorhines. Closure of the primate postorbital bar and anthropoid origins form the focus of Rosenberger et al.'s article.
A detailed preface and bibliography provides an interesting review of Szalay's contributions to the field, and of his philosophical approaches to the subject. The many papers on early primates make this volume essential reading for students of this group. However, the work will also be of interest to those involved in the broader issues of mammalian functional morphology, descriptive anatomy, and phylogeny. It is an impressive volume, and a fitting tribute.
