A Megadiverse Fauna Revealed

Abstract

Despite phenomenal biological richness, China’smam-mal fauna is staggeringly little known, especially toWestern scientists. This has always been the case.Incredibly, all of the 101 endemic mammals of China(by my count, from this book’s species accounts—theintroduction says 109) were described within the last150 years, beginning with the description of the TaiwanSerow (Capricornis swinhoei), a medium-sized goat-antelope, in 1862. These endemics comprise part of aregional fauna that was closed off and unknown to theearlier great describers of mammals—to Linnaeus inSweden; Geoffroy, the Cuviers, and Desmarest in France;Pallas, Schreber, Wagner, and Peters in Germany;Temminck in Holland; and Waterhouse in Britain. Startingin the 1860s, regular description of tremendous zoologicalnovelties from China, including very large mammals, wasa stunning theme for a half century in mammalogy.Examples included Pere David’sdeer(Elaphurus davidia-nus) in 1866, the Snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecusspp.) in 1870, the Tufted deer (Elaphodus cephalophus)in1872, Przewalski’s horse (Equus caballus przewalskii)in 1881, the White-lipped deer (Przewalskium albirostris)in 1883—and of course, not to be forgotten, the GiantPanda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), inimitable in its imag-inative appeal, in 1869. This heady spasm of discoveryculminated in the description of the Yangtze RiverDolphin, or Baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) in 1918, markingthe close of the last truly phenomenal episode of largemammal discovery anywhere in the world.More than 10% of all living mammal species can befound in China. With a vast land area spanning mind-boggling habitat and topographic variability, and straddlingthe borders of two great zoogeographic realms—Palaearcticand Indo-Malayan—China is rich in biological diversityand also rich in endemism. A Guide to the Mammals ofChina, edited by Andrew Smith and Yan Xie, is the mostnoteworthy attempt to review the entire Chinese mammalfauna since Harvard’s greatest mammalogist, Glover M.Allen, published his incredible two-volume tract on thesubject 70 years ago (The Mammals of China andMongolia; Allen 1938, 1940). With so much ground tocover, and so few previous syntheses to draw from, Smithand Xie’s attempt to succeed Allen is not just ambitious butvaliant, and also, thankfully, worthy. Although detailed andhigh quality Chinese-language reviews of the Chinesemammal fauna (or parts of it) are increasingly available(e.g., Shek 2006; Pan et al. 2007), Smith and Xie’s volumerepresents the most current and detailed overview of whichI am aware.In addition to the editors, contributors to the volumeinclude five other mammalogists who authored theaccounts of particular taxa—Robert Hoffman (squirrelsand insectivores), Darrin Lunde (muroid rodents andinsectivores), John MacKinnon (primates, even-toedungulates, and elephants), Don Wilson (bats), and ChrisWozencraft (carnivorans). Many accounts are authored orcoauthored by Smith himself.For me, the main disappointment is in the book’sintroduction, authored by the editors, where a slender 14pages are used to provide an overview of Chinesemammal biogeography, the history of Chinese mammal-ogy (which does not mention the spasm of largemammal description during 1862–1918, highlightedabove), mammal conservation in China, China’spro-