Fossil Horses : Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae

Rating:
Summary: Primarily for the specialist
Review: I got this book brand new for 50 pence as apparently the book had no buyers.

For 10,000 years human civilization depended on horses and unsurprisingly horse evolution was a hot scientific topic at a time when people had no faster means of personal transport. History and its emperors are littered with tales of the horse and the equine symbollism in war and heroism is still with us. Given such a magical subject McFadden's book represents a somewhat staid academic account in the style of a scientific paper. Peppered with many references McFadden treats the reader like an academic used to such presentation and fails to enliven his topic. He touches all too briefly on the cultural importance of the horse and the book lacks any decent illustrations save several charts and technical drawings.

McFadden has certainly put in a great deal of hard work and covers many topics from the history of the study of horse evolution to geneology, geological time and the work he and his co-workers have produced. The book is too specific on the Equidae and does not deal adequately with recently extinct members of this family like the quagga and prehistoric species. Nor does it explain clearly why horses may have dissapeared from the Americas. Parts of the book, e.g., the limb locking mechanism were for me hard to follow. The book is afraid of speculation.

It provides ample materials and references to the student and to the paleontologist and is a good textbook. It fails to dramatise its subject and to attract a "lay audience". We are not really treated to what makes horses so special but to its credit it represents a highly authoritative and up to (its) date digest.

Rating:
Summary: Best fossil horse book out there
Review: I'm a novice trying to understand the incredibly complex history, 58 million years, of the horse. I went on a dig and had the fun of finding bones and teeth from Miocene thru Pleistocene horses. I had a lot of questions after I got home about various issues raised by what we found. This book answered them and more. It's a real scientist's book, not a coffee table book, so it takes some concentrated reading, but I learned things that allowed me to go the natural history museum and perceive the fine points in the display. There were interesting asides also about the perspectives of scientists from the last few centuries, and earlier graphics to compare to new ones illustrating how the understanding of evolution has changed over the years. I'm going on another dig and this time I may know what I'm looking at.