Mammoths, sabertooths and hominids. 65 million years of mammalian evolution in Erope / Мамонты, саблезубые и гоминиды. 65 миллионов лет эволюции млекопитающих в Европе

To succeed in writing a book about the age of mammals in Europe appears to be a difficult goal, especially in light of such brilliant precedents as The Age of Mammals by H. F. Osborn and The Age of Mammals by Bjo¨rn Kurten. In between this book and the 1971 version of The Age of Mammals there is not only the extraordinary scientific personality of Kurten but also thirty years of additional knowledge about fossil mammals and the environment in which they evolved. In the past decades, the amount of new information on some selected time slices in the history of our planet has increased enormously. This is particularly true for the Pleistocene, but also for the Miocene and Pliocene (the so-called Neogene); and even the oldest periods of the Cenozoic, Paleocene, Eocene, and Oligocene are much better known today than at the beginning of the 1970s. At the same time, there are texts dealing with the subject outside Europe, such as C. Janis, K. M. Scott, and L. L. Jacobs’s Evolution of Tertiary Mammals of North America, and others in preparation, such as A. Turner and M. Anton’s Evolving Eden on the faunas of African mammalian fossils. We have, therefore, restricted the scope of our topic to Europe, in the wider sense: from Iberia to the Urals and Georgia.<...>