Preface

Summary

The first edition of Teeth was published in 1986. This second edition, which became affectionately known as Teeth II, has very largely been rewritten. One of the main changes is an expansion of the taxonomic range. The first edition included 150 genera of mammals from the western Palaearctic (Europe, western Asia and North Africa). This made it possible to keep the size of the job down to manageable proportions, and also kept the book down to the intended size but, as the largest sales were in North America, this approach did not fit well with its main readership. In 1996, I published Dental Anthropology, also with Cambridge University Press, which duplicated a good deal of specifically human material in Teeth. This made it possible to give less emphasis to the human component in Teeth II, leaving space to include a total of 325 genera, representing the Holarctic in its entirety, including Europe, North Africa, Western, Central and North-east Asia, and North America. Humans are still included, but the level of detail is closer to that of the other mammals. The other changes in Teeth II are more to do with changing my mind about various issues, and updating references, rather than dramatic developments in the subject. One of the striking things about returning to the text almost 20 years later is how few of the fundamentals have in fact changed.

It would not have been possible to write this book without access to the great zoological collections of the world.