A Desert Calling: Life in a forbidding landscape by Michael Mares, Harvard University Press, £20.50/$29.95/ 34.40, ISBN 0674007476
WORKING in sand dunes, pebbly desert pavement and blazing salt flats in Argentina, Iran and Egypt, Michael Mares has achieved something almost impossible for a contemporary scientist in Europe or North America: he has discovered and named several new species, even genera, of mammals. He’s now curator of mammals and director of the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma.
Mares was first called to the desert in Argentina in 1970. Confident that the rodents of…
