A guide to the native mammals of Australia.

Everyone interested in nature, in conservation, and in the Australian environment as a whole would like answers to questions about the fate of the native mammals and whether certain ones are likely to become extinct. This book is written by a zoologist who, as a mammalogist of many years' experience, and as a policy-maker in conservation, has tried to find out what we have to know before we can attempt an answer to specific questions about different species.

The book begins with a general layout of the subject; it explains the general principles, historical and environmental, which have resulted in the distribution of the different kinds of Australian mammals and tells of the changes which are radically altering these distributions. It describes, too, the species of Australian mammals (partly through Ella Fry's drawings and partly through itemising the characters which belong to each species); it tells where they occur and states the nature of the environment which is known to contain them.

Although the book is written in everyone's and not for the professional mammalogist, the author has recognised the need in Australian mammalogy today for a concise work of identification for the various species. Because the descriptions in this work are the sort of most use to the person who cannot make a detailed anatomical examination, these are supplemented by an appendix, for the student and advanced worker, which contains detailed bibliographic references to definitive anatomical descriptions in the professional literature.