Kemp, T. S. “Major Transitions in Vertebrate Evolution.” (2009): 892-895.
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In 1988 Bob Carroll wrote a new version of Romer’s classic Vertebrate paleontology , and achieved the impossible by imposing his own personality on it, yet nevertheless actually improving it ([Carroll, 1988](javascript:;)); despite its age it remains the standard text book of the subject. Bob is also a prodigious worker within the field, mostly on Palaeozoic tetrapods, and this fine and fitting volume is a Festschrift in honour of his retirement, edited by two of his former students. There are ten contributions and, as is inevitable with the genre, it is not a comprehensive coverage of the field of the title, in the sense that a monograph or text book would be, but it is nevertheless pretty wide ranging, with chapters on vertebrate skeletal tissues, early vertebrates, paired fins, the tetrapod limb, amphibians, basal amniotes, snakes, birds, the Mesozoic mammal radiation, and whales. Each is primarily a review essay. Several of them are very useful contributions indeed, especially those concerning transitions where significant new fossils have come to light in recent years: Philippe Janvier discusses the various candidate stem vertebrate, cyclostome, and gnathostome taxa. Luis Chiappe and Gareth Dyke provide a detailed review of the confusing plethora of feathered ‘dinosaurs’, near-birds’, and early birds of the Cretaceous that have been discovered, most notably in the Jehol Formation of China but also Spain. Amongst mammal taxa, the origin of cetaceans from their terrestrial ancestry has been considerably illuminated in recent years by fossils of limbed whales of the Eocene, as reviewed by Mark Uhen, while Michael Caldwell describes how the early evolution of snakes is starting to be clarified by fossils with small, but patent and just about functional hind limbs.