A memorial volume dedicated to Jim Hopson, who, during the past 40 years, has revolutionized our understanding of basal mammals, Amniote Paleobiology comprises a series of papers authored by his former post-graduate and post-doctoral students at the University of Chicago, most of them unsurprisingly focusing on aspects of mammalian palaeobiology. Given the title, I was hoping for a volume composed of papers on large-scale evolutionary processes and incorporating techniques that would be applicable to all areas of vertebrate palaeontology. However, I was disappointed to find that most of the papers are descriptive, narrow in scope, and would only really appeal to those with extensive knowledge of the group in question.

The text is divided into five parts: the first, titled ‘New Fossils and Phylogenies’, comprises five papers on diverse topics from a re-description of a mandible of the early tetrapod Whatcheeria, which, given the in depth discussion on phylogenetic characters, would have benefited from a new phylogeny, to a phylogeny of living and extinct armadillos. Part two, ‘Large-scale Evolutionary Patterns’, comprises three papers, two of which, those by Parrish, and Rougier & Wible, appear to be essentially review papers, and offer little new information. Part three, ‘Functional Morphology’, includes an important contribution by Paul Sereno, in which, among other things, he proposes new phylogenetic definitions for mammalian higher taxonomy. Part four, ‘Ontogeny and Evolution’, includes an interesting contribution by Richard Blob, in which he examines the utility of limb-bone scaling in cynognathian cynodonts for usage in assessing metabolic modes, although the other papers in this section are somewhat disappointing. The final section, ‘Reflections on James Allen Hopson’, comprises a biography and a bibliography of Hopson's publications.

The quality of papers and editorial style varies widely throughout the book; in places the text is too chatty and informal, noticeably in the contributions by Lombard and Bolt, and that of O'Keefe. Quality of the illustrations is also extremely variable: those of Lombard and Bolt are beautiful, while in other contributions they are rather lacking. Munter and Clark would have benefited from line drawings of the pelvis of the theropod dinosaur being described, rather than the unclear photos presented, while O'Keefe's figures are recycled from his earlier publications, do not illustrate the braincases being described, and as such render the paper almost impossible to understand for the non-specialist. Although contributions to the book were apparently peer-reviewed, one feels that some of the papers may not have made it to publication in journals where the peer-review process was more stringent.

Although there are several fascinating and important papers in this book, it is hard to see to whom the volume as a whole would appeal: the topics are too disparate and narrow to warrant the title.