C 2005) International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 26, No. 5, October 2005 ( DOI: 10.1007/s10764-005-6471-3
Book Review The Encyclopedia of Animals: A Complete Visual Guide. Fred Cooke, Hugh Dingle, Stephen Hutchinson, George McKay, Richard Schodde, Noel Tait, and Richard Vogt, consulting editors. Weldon Owen Pty. Ltd. and University of California Press, 2004, 608 pages, 475 color photographs, 1700 color illustrations, 950 maps, 125 tables, US$39.95 (hardcover). This is a huge brightly colored coffee-table book packed full of solid biological information. The first 50 pages are well-written surveys of classification, evolution, general biology, behavior, biota and ecology, and conservation, illustrated with photos, maps, a few color paintings, and a phylogenetic tree. Then we turn to individual sections on different groups of animals, each with fact files, maps, habitat icons and a feature box on selected species. What space would you apportion to each class and order of animals? Now, there are somewhat over 1 million species of living animals currently recognized, and of these over 370,000 belong to a Coleoptera (beetles: p. 563). You’d allocate about a third of the book to the beetles, right? Not in this case. The book has about 180 pages devoted to mammals, 110 to birds, 60 to reptiles, 30 to amphibians, 70 to fishes—and 70 to the whole of the invertebrates. (The last includes 3 pages of that wonderful miscellany, the “minor invertebrate phyla,” with paintings of a horseshoe worm, an arrow worm and no fewer than 3 species of velvet worms—and even a photo of water bears). In theory, this is unbalanced, but I know of no equivalent book that is any different. Mammals are the biggest, the most visible, the most familiar of animals, and if you want to attract public attention that’s what you feature. Why not? The primatologist will be tempted to turn directly to p. 98, where the section on Primates starts (and it lasts till p. 121), but the first 50 pages should not be overlooked because they form an excellent backdrop to the rest of the book, and let us know right away that the consulting editors are 1213 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 0164-0291/05/1000-1213/0
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first-rate biologists. General principles in each case are set out, with nicely chosen examples, though the tweeness of some of the headings is perhaps unfortunate: “Populate or perish” heads a paragraph on reproductive rates, while “Sex wars” and “Fanfare and demonstration” are the titles of sequential paragraphs on mating strategies and sexual selection. When we get to the species galleries, the fine color photos persist, but we also begin to meet the color paintings that are an advertised feature of the book. They were done by the Czech group called MagicGroup s.r.o. In the main they are admirable – except, I’m afraid, for some of the Primates. I do not recognize either the slow or the slender loris (p. 105), or the pygmy marmoset (p. 107), or the pig-tailed macaque (p. 113), or the Sykes monkey (p. 116). Others vary from just about recognizable to quite excellent. It’s odd, because they don’t on the whole have such trouble depicting most other animals, though the African elephant (p. 165) looks a bit strange, and some of the antelopes (pp. 179–181) could have come straight out of Sir William Jardine’s Naturalist’s Library published in the 1830s. The taxonomic treatment is quite good, though they lay down the law where numbers of species are concerned. There are 295 species of the order Primates (p. 98), of which 63 are “prosimians” (p. 100). (They are aware of the Strepsirhini/Haplorhini division, and use it—even if they spell the “-rhini” bits each with one “r”—so I wish they’d dispensed with “prosimians” altogether). At times they are well up-to-date (Galago rondoensis is mentioned on p. 104), at times they have missed out (there are not just 3 species of monotremes, but ≥5 [p. 66], and one of the consulting editors is famous for having worked on elephants and should know that there are 3 species of elephants, not 2 [p. 164])! Still, these are mostly quibbles. The book is well designed to stimulate interest in animals, it gives good solid factual material set in some theoretical context—sufficient to satisfy the popular market, anyway—and, perhaps most importantly, it continually emphasizes the need for conservation. As far as the primates section is concerned, there is a full page (p. 121) headed “Conserving Primates,” featuring the presumed extinction of Miss Waldron’s Red colobus and the problem of forest destruction; about half of the page is devoted to orangutan rescue. Not expensive for what it is, it should serve a useful function. Pity about those lorises, though. Dr. Colin P. Groves Archaeology and Anthropology Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
