Every Palaeocast podcast to which I’ve listened – and I have every reason to believe I now listened to them all – has been very much worth the time spent doing so and far more beside in the understanding of the subjects they have presented. However, while they are all well done, some still stand out above the rest. Most recently, one of these stand-outs was Episode 126: Beasts Before Us.
In this episode, Dr. Elsa Panciroli, the Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History and a member of the Palaeocast team, was interviewed by the podcast’s founder and long-time host Dr. Dave Marshall about her research into early mammals and her recently published book on the subject: Beasts Before Us; The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution.
Published by Bloomsbury’s Sigma imprint, and now available in the U.S. as well as the U.K., this new book presents a dynamic new view into the emergence of mammals beginning with the Synapsida’s divergence from reptiles in the Carboniferous period. From there, Dr. Panciroli guides her readers through some of the most up-to-date research and theories about how these creatures developed and took advantage of the opportunities offered to adapt, evolve, and become what they – and we – are today.
As one with a keen interest in early mammals and their evolution, I was very excited – indeed, even bordering on giddy – to discover that a book by such a talented scholar of the subject as Dr. Panciroli had been written and published for a wide audience. And as a copy has now reached me here in the back of beyond (well, beyond Great Britain, at least), I’m very much looking forward to diving in with both eyes and discovering what new wonders await between its covers.
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