Recommendation: Buy British version of Dawkin's The Ancestor's Tale

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

Greetings,

I've just read the review of the latest Richard Dawkin's book _The Ancestor's 
Tale_ in Science. I highly recommend this book: it is
a nice walk down the cladogram, from modern humans to the base of the tree. It 
introduces the term "concestor" (a neologism for
"most recent common ancestor").

BUT as I discovered (to my dismay) in the review, the British edition has 
full-color life "restorations" of the hypothetical
concestors at each node. These paintings, or even B&W versions of them, are 
utterly lacking in the American edition, dammit!

By the way, the rules of the book (violated only rarely, as in the discussion 
of extinct hominins) is that Dawkin's only deals with
nodes joining crown groups. So the concestor of Amniota is discussed; the 
concestor of Mammaliformes is not.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
        Mailing Address:
                Building 237, Room 1117
                College Park, MD  20742

http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-405-0796