In a fascinating story of discovery and science, we meet a remote population of wolves unafraid of humans.
 
For parts of twenty-four summers, wolf biologist L. David Mech lived with a group of wolves on Ellesmere Island, some six hundred miles from the North Pole. Elsewhere, most wolves flee from even the scent of humans, but these animals, evolving relatively free from human persecution, are unafraid. Having already spent twenty-eight years studying other populations of wolves more remotely by aircraft, snow-tracking, live-trapping, and radio-tracking, Mech was primed to join their activities up close and record their interactions with each other. This book tells the remarkable story of what Mech—and the researchers who followed him—have learned while living among the wolves.
 
The Ellesmere wolves were so unconcerned with Mech’s presence that they allowed him to camp near their den and to sit on his all-terrain vehicle as he observed them, watching packs as large as seven adults and six pups go about their normal activities. In these extraordinarily close quarters, a pup untying his bootlace or an adult sniffing his gloved hand was just part of daily life. Mech accompanied the wolves on their travels and watched as they hunted muskoxen and arctic hares. By achieving the same kind of intimacy with his wild hosts’ every action that we might experience living with domesticated dogs, Mech gained new insights into common but rarely studied behaviors like pup feeding, food caching, howling, and scent-marking. After Mech’s time at Ellesmere ended, his coauthors and fellow wolf researchers Morgan Anderson and H. Dean Cluff spent parts of four summers studying the wolves via radio collars, further illuminating the creatures’ movements and ecology. This book synthesizes their findings, offering both a compelling scientific overview of the animals’ behavior—from hunting to living in packs to rearing pups—and a tale of adventure and survival in the Arctic.

The recent explosion of publications on African prehistory has forced researchers in vertebrate evolution to sift through countless details of morphology, distribution and geological setting. Now, to simplify access to this information, Vincent Maglio and H.B.S. Cooke have prepared a single volume that summarizes our current knowledge about the origin and evolution of the Class Mammalia in Africa. Their book, consequently, is of great importance, and much of its material derives from ongoing research not available in any other published form.

In thirty chapters, fifteen mammalian orders are described in detail—their taxonomic groupings; the origins of their various subgroups; geographical distributions; major phyletic units; and specific evolutionary trends. Numerous illustrations accompany the text, and complete bibliographic references are given for each group. The modern mammalian fauna of Africa is summarized, with a description of the environments in which it is found. Man's impact on wildlife is also assessed. The major geological deposits of the African Cenozoic are reviewed, and the broader patterns of faunal evolution are synthesized in an attempt to cut across taxonomic boundaries and demonstrate the interdependence of faunal events on the continent as a whole.

In 1987, the University of Chicago Press published Primate Societies, the standard reference in the field of primate behavior for an entire generation of students and scientists. But in the twenty-five years since its publication, new theories and research techniques for studying the Primate order have been developed, debated, and tested, forcing scientists to revise their understanding of our closest living relatives.

Intended as a sequel to Primate Societies, The Evolution of Primate Societies compiles thirty-one chapters that review the current state of knowledge regarding the behavior of nonhuman primates. Chapters are written by the leading authorities in the field and organized around four major adaptive problems primates face as they strive to grow, maintain themselves, and reproduce in the wild. The inclusion of chapters on the behavior of humans at the end of each major section represents one particularly novel aspect of the book, and it will remind readers what we can learn about ourselves through research on nonhuman primates. The final section highlights some of the innovative and cutting-edge research designed to reveal the similarities and differences between nonhuman and human primate cognition. The Evolution of Primate Societies will be every bit the landmark publication its predecessor has been.