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4.5
This book picks up where "Walking With Dinosaurs" left off, shortly after the meteorite hit Chixulub near the Yucatan and set off the cataclysmic environmental changes that wiped out most of the species then populating our planet, including all of the dinosaurs. The mammals were hit hard but rebounded with a vengeance, and by the time this book opens, after the dust had died down and the planet was again habitable, they had become the dominant life form on earth. The book takes us through several geological periods, introducing us to various species which became dominant and then extinct in their turn, up through the last great ice age in which some extinct life forms, notably the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, interacted with a relative newcomer on the planet named homo sapiens. Haines also shows how homo sapiens descended from australopithecus, the first recognizable humanid, and how many of the social traits of the first humans were handed down through the generations to the present time. Somehow, prehistoric mammals have never generated the same kind of awe that dinosaurs have, maybe because they remind us of animals we are already familiar with, but they provide a fascinating glimpse of how life evolved down through the millenia, and just because many of them looked vaguely like animals currently on our planet, and some of them were actually contemporaneous with human beings, we can imagine what life might have been like had they hung around for a few more epochs. Imagine seeing a giant Indricothere (who looked something like a cross between an overweight giraffe and an elephant) ambling down your street; or witnessing a run-in between a sabre-tooth cat and a giant sloth (sloth wins every time), or chasing a stray mammoth out of your yard. At the end of the book we realize that Haines' greatest achievement is in showing us that extinction has been the fate of most of the species on earth since life first began; and that we are, after all, just another species of mammal, and therefore subject to -- perhaps destined to -- extinction in our own turn.
