Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful: South American Mammals

Abstract

It is especially fitting that in the year leading up to the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, a group of animals that played such an important role in the development of his ideas, the South American mammals, have received a new and exhaustive treatment. The Neotropical faunal region, dominated by the continent of South America, is home to one of the most diverse mammalian faunas on the planet. The Neotropics may have the largest number of mammalian species of any of the major faunal provinces on the planet (Cole et al. 1994), with the second highest number of families and the largest number of endemic families (Feldhamer et al. 2007). Yet despite the significance of this fauna, Alfred Gardner, the editor of this new treatise on South American mammals, notes, “it is obvious the taxonomy and distribution of most South American mammals remain inadequately known and revisions of most groups are needed” (p. xvi). This book has as its goal a summary of current knowledge of South American mammal taxonomy and biogeography, highlighting what is known and what remains problematic. Several fairly extensive treatments of Neotropical mammals have been published over the last two decades (Eisenberg 1989; Redford and Eisenberg 1992; Emmons and Feer 1997; Eisenberg and Redford 1999; Lord 2007), but none is as ambitious or attempts to be as comprehensive. According to the editor, work onMammals of South America was initiated in the early 1980s, and the current book is the first of three planned volumes, each devoted to a separate taxonomic segment of the South American mammalian fauna. This first volume covers the marsupial orders and three placental ordinal or supraordinal level taxa: Xenarthra, Soricomorpha, and Chiroptera. The second volume will cover Rodents, and the third the remaining placental taxa. Geographic coverage includes the continent of South America itself and several nearby island chains Trinidad and Tobago, the Netherland Antilles, and the Galapagos Islands but excludes the Central American portion of the Neotropics. The bulk of the text of the first volume consists of quite detailed, and for the most part, upto-date species accounts for all the relevant South American mammal species. These accounts include detailed synonymies for the species themselves, as well as any recognized subspecies, descriptions of geographic distributions at both the specific and subspecific level, and detailed range maps for each species. The latter are based on marginal locality records, and these records are also listed in the text with appropriate references provided, a very useful feature of the book. Each species account also includes a summary of the species’ natural history and a discussion section that treats problematic issues with its taxonomy or distriJ Mammal Evol (2009) 16:307–308 DOI 10.1007/s10914-009-9111-4