Breed, B., and F. Ford.2007. Native Mice and Rats. Australian Natural History Series, CSIRO Publishing, Colling-wood, Victoria, Australia, 185 pp. ISBN 978-0-6430-9166-5, price (paper), AU$39.95

B. Breed, F. Ford. 2007. Native Mice and Rats. Australian Natural History Series, CSIRO Publishing, Colling-wood, Victoria, Australia, 185 pp. ISBN 978-0-6430-9166-5, price (paper), AU$39.95. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone with a serious interest in mammals and in all institutional research libraries, because it brings current nearly all that is known about Australia's native rodents, following The Rodents of Australia by Watts and Aslin (1981). This book will be particularly useful for those planning to conduct field or laboratory research on Australia's rodents, whether they are Australians or visiting researchers, and at all levels of scholarly achievement from advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students to postdoctoral and more-senior researchers. Throughout, the authors stress the great diversity of this rodent fauna, comprising about 60 extant species and 2 major subgroups of the family Muridae: old endemics (12 genera) that arrived around 4–5 million years ago (mya), and new endemics (1 genus, all Rattus spp.) that arrived around 1.8 mya, all likely from Southeast Asia via New Guinea, with most of the diversification and speciation occurring after arrival. Most naturalists from North America and Europe, and many from Australia, think of Australia as a land of marsupials and monotremes without acknowledging that nearly 25% of the endemic mammalian species there are rodents. I 1st visited Australia in 1966 with the former notion in mind, but soon became aware of this diversity through the tutelage of Basil Marlow, …