Barlow, Connie. The ghosts of evolution; nonsensical fruit, missing partners, and other ecological anachronisms.

Perseus, Basic Books. 291 p. illus, bibliog, index, c2000. 0465-00552-7 $18.00. SA

The world is always a better place for having people in it who ask "Why?" This childlike inquiry often can poke a hole through the wall of ignorance and open up whole realms of study. Ecologist Dan Janzen saw that many large tropical fruits simply fell and rotted, "going nowhere." There were no animals large enough to eat and consequently disperse them through normal means. Why? Were the animals that evolved along with these trees long gone? What animals were they and why did they vanish? How did the trees survive without them--and what flora went extinct with the animals? Dan Janzen wrote a surprisingly controversial article with Paul Martin (writer of this book's foreword) that led, 20 years later, to Connie Barlow's expanded investigation.

"The Age of Great Mammals has indeed ended everywhere except southern Africa and patches of tropical Asia... in Europe and non-tropical regions of Asia, it petered out in steps between 50,000 and 15,000 years ago, when the straight tusked elephants, woolly mammoths, rhinos and other great beasts of the Pleistocene epoch vanished ... North America lost 68 percent of its genetic richness ..." Barlow goes on to list the "missing partners" of many fruit, including most notably the avocado and the honey locust (with its large, sweet-tasting pods) and makes us almost long for repletion of what was once an American Serengeti. In fact (in a gear shift present in the book), there are those who would like to "restart the evolution of an extinct order, the proboscideans: the elephants, the mammoths, the mastodons." Russian scientist Sergei Zimov is hoping to bring Canadian wood bison, reindeer and moose back to Siberia after 2,000 years, creating their own Pleistocene Park.

This is heady stuff, but fascinating. It is startling to realize that just 200 years ago "Western humans had no awareness of extinction." Thomas Jefferson truly thought and hoped that Lewis and Clark would discover mammoths. "Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of animals to become extinct ..." Jefferson was unfortunately wrong, but one can't fault him for the dream. There are several dreamers--backed by scientific observation-in The Ghosts of Evolution. It will be interesting to see where their dreams take us. Recommended for all libraries.

Katherine E. Gillen, Libn., Luke AFB Lib., AZ