Ice Age Mammals of North America book review

Ice Age Mammals of North America by Ian M. Lange

In my search for reading material to help me better understand the Ice Age exhibit coming to the MOST, this has been the best.  This is a fantastic book for my needs.  I am not going to go into much of the content of the book, but I want to share a few thoughts.

The first thing I would like to point out is that the title and cover do not match what is under the hood.  If you couldn't read English and picked up a copy of this book, you might think this was meant for 8-12 year old kids.  It is glossy, floppy, has many illustrations, and the design of the text on the cover really appear to be created to get kids attention.  An intelligent and committed middle schooler may be able to follow the author's descriptions of the Ice Age, but this really seems like a book for high school students and adults.

What Ian M. Lange has done is create a fantastic overview of The Ice Age and how it related to North America.  The title implies the book is a guide to mammals, but much of the book is dedicated to explained the history of ice ages and the methods and history of the science.  He also does a great job describing many of the interesting animals from the Pleistocene that lived in North America.  What I like is that he puts the animals in an evolutionary context, explaining the species that let up to them.  In this way the reader gets a much better understanding of the relationship between the animals than a simple snapshots of each animal would do.  Mr. Lange even includes Woolly rhinos in the book.  He explains that they never made it to North America, but they got close enough and are really interesting.

Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the book are the pop-up sections.  Every so often the text will be interrupted with a pop up section that is a couple pages long.  Each one deals with an interesting question or topic.  Some of the topics include mammal mummies, clovis spears and culture, and tar pits.  Later this week I am leading a staff training on the traveling ice age exhibit, and I'm thinking that I will break the staff up into small groups and have each read one of these pop-up sections.

If I was going to recommend only one of the books I've read so far on the topic, this would be it.  This gives a great overview of what was happening in North America during the Pleistocene, and is full of interesting information.  .  Understanding the ice ages isn't just interesting from a "wow that's cool" perspective   It is an important topic for understanding human culture, environmental conservation, and climate change.  Start here and then journey into the many facets of this topic explored in other books.