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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 editors

 

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]b

 

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