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The mammals of
Australia
third edition
Edited by Steve Van Dyck and Ronald Strahan
ISBN 9781877069253, published in 2008 by Reed New Holland, colour, hard cover, 887 pages
Price $A125.00 plus $A11 postage within
Australia
, overseas postage please request a quote
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This book provides an account of every species of native mammal known to have existed in
Australia
since European settlement, 389 species in total, and is an important record of this country’s wildlife heritage. The text has been written by more than 240 expert authors and it is magnificently illustrated with colour photographs. Each species account includes a detailed description of the animal and its behaviour, a distribution map and a fact box that gives size, identification features, synonyms and alternative common names, subspecies, conservation status and abundance. This third edition includes an additional 91 species’ accounts - including for the first time whales and dolphins that occur in Australian territorial waters - along with more than 200 new photographs. All species accounts from previous editions have been revised and updated.
About the authors
Steve Van Dyck PhD spent a feral childhood among ringtails and wattlebirds in the sandstone gullies around Epping, Sydney. These rich beginnings facilitated an early shift of careers from teaching to a cadetship at the
Queensland
Museum
in 1975, where he is now the Senior Curator of Vertebrates. He has studied the status of a number of rare and threatened mammals in
Queensland
as well as investigated the relationships of small carnivorous marsupials in
Australia
and
New Guinea
.
Ronald Strahan AM was an academic zoologist before becoming the director of
Sydney
’s Taronga Zoo. As Research Fellow at the
Australian
Museum
(
Sydney
) and Executive Officer of Nature Focus, the museum’s photographic library of Australian Wildlife, he wrote or edited many books on Australian terrestrial vertebrates, including the first two editions of this book. He is now retired.
Table of contents [simplified]
- Introduction
- Monotremes: platypus and echidnas
- Marsupials: carnivorous marsupials; bandicoots and bilbies; koala, wombats, possums and macropods; marsupial moles
- Eutherian or placental mammals: insectivores; bats; microbats; rodents; dugong and manatees; carnivorous eutherian mammals; rabbit and hare; horse and donkey; pig, camel, horned ruminants and deer
- Whales and dolphins
- Glossary
- Index