A Desert Calling: Life in a forbidding landscape by Michael Mares, Harvard University Press, 拢20.50/$29.95/ 34.40, ISBN 0674007476
WORKING in sand dunes, pebbly desert pavement and blazing salt flats in Argentina, Iran and Egypt, Michael Mares has achieved something almost impossible for a contemporary scientist in Europe or North America: he has discovered and named several new species, even genera, of mammals. He鈥檚 now curator of mammals and director of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma.
Mares was first called to the desert in Argentina in 1970. Confident that the rodents of the Monte Desert at the foot of the Andes would be similar to those in the Sonora Desert in Arizona, he set out to study their ecology. He was wrong: evolution was at work on both sides of the equator, but it came up with different solutions for the Monte. Decades of study in Argentina, spiced with short visits to Iran and the Sahara, have made Mares a world authority on desert mammals.
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Much of A Desert Calling is devoted to the joys and tribulations of fieldwork in environments unfriendly, both in climate and politics. But Mares includes many pointed reminders, to general readers and fellow scientists, about the importance of deserts, which are richer in mammal species, at least, than the lush tropical rainforests that dominate the discussions of how to preserve biodiversity.