A History of Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere

In this landmark 1913 work, William Berryman Scott unfolds an epic spanning sixty million years. Here are the mammals of the Americas in their full strangeness and splendor: the bizarre uintatheres of the Eocene, the thundering titanotheres that once crashed through ancient forests, the saber-toothed cats and giant ground sloths that witnessed the arrival of humans. Scott was there at the golden age of American fossil discovery, working alongside the pioneers who first began to read the continent's buried past. His narrative carries the electricity of that era of revelation, when scientists were reconstructing worlds no human had ever seen. This is not a dry catalogue but a passionate argument for what fossil bones can tell us about the deep past and our place within it. Written for the curious layperson as much as the specialist, it balances scientific rigor with the wonder that drove Scott from his boyhood fossil-collecting expeditions in New Jersey to Princeton's halls. A century later, it remains a foundational text for understanding how the mammalian fauna of two continents came to be.