Customer Reviews

Herpetology

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Despite some fairly serious errors and omissions, this book is the best academic treatment of the field of herpetology yet written. It is a multi-authored text which allows people to write on what they know best, rather than making authors stretch well beyond their fields of expertise. This unfortunately means there's a lot of repetition between chapters, and some flat-out contradictions. It does a fairly good of reviewing the literature in a number of sub-fields of herpetology, and so provides more up-to-date reviews than you're likely to find in "Biology of the Reptilia". It is a good choice for a herpetology course for undergraduates--in fact I plan to use it for such a course in summer 1999. Amazing omissions: dinosaurs!! birds!! biogeography!! Notable inclusions: good chapters on foraging ecology, classification (too short), & thermoregulation.

I have just finished an undergradute course which used this book as the main text. I agree with the previous reviewer that there is considerable overlap and occasional contradiction. The early chapters tend to use a lot of technical jargon, and seem to be written for people who already understand the material. I was not so impressed with phylogenic descriptions which frequently failed to discuss unifying characteristics within families. Later sections, including locomotion, water balance, and mate selection are well written. This book would benefit from a glossary, more relevant tables and figures, and a more inclusive index. Overall, editing is rather sketchy.