Nematodes are hugely abundant, diverse and important but, despite this, it is startling how little we know of their deep evolutionary history. In this respect, nematodes do shockingly badly compared with arthropods. This book seeks to address this. It is a magnificent, scholarly work, which is clearly a labour of a lifetime of love of nematodes. This monograph is a synthesis of what is known about ancient nematodes, mainly from specimens preserved in amber, and crucially dependent on the author's own work presented here.

The books moves through evolutionary time, starting with the earliest clear nematode fossils (from approximately 390 million years ago (MYA)), but the majority of this work deals with fossils from the Tertiary period (65–5 MYA). The vast majority of the specimens are from amber, particularly Baltic and Dominican, which gives excellent preservation (and allows some taxonomic work), but also gives insights into the biology of these preserved specimens. Most notable among these are the huge mermithid nematodes (several times the length of their hosts) frozen in time as they are leaving their insect hosts, also caught in the amber. In some specimens, nematodes are visible inside their arthropod hosts. There is a whole range of other nematodes too, some presumably free-living, some perhaps with phoretic associations with their entombed hosts; there are plant parasitic nematodes too. The book is lavishly illustrated with more than 250 black and white photographs and 32 colour plates.

Nematode taxonomy is difficult enough, even with ideally fixed and prepared specimens to hand; taxonomy of fossilized nematodes is certainly not for the faint hearted. In the second major section of this book (and consisting of almost a quarter of it) there is a complete taxonomy of fossil nematode taxa, including dozens described here for the first time. This section is very clearly for the specialist nematode taxonomist. The morphological and other characters underlying this taxonomy are necessarily incomplete, but provide a clear structure for other workers in this area. For me, the most interesting section was an attempt to work out nematode time lines, particularly when different lifestyles and host associations arose. This section, though, also makes clear the limits that fossil nematode taxonomy has. I cannot see that we are ever going to understand the deep history of the nematodes from the fossil record. Molecular phylogenetic work with nematodes has developed over recent years, which is beginning to reach some consensus. The enduring fascination of nematodes for many of us (especially for readers of Parasitology) are the diverse lifestyles of parasitic species. Sadly, we will perhaps never know the deep history of parasitism, and instead we can but imagine, as this book stimulates us to do.