Book Review: Voles and Lemmings (Arvicolinae) of the Palaearctic Region. Boris Kryštufek and Georgy I. Shenbrot. ۲۰۲۲. University of Maribor, University Press. ۴۳۶ pp.

The book by Boris Kryštufek and Georgy I. Shenbrot, published a few weeks ago, is an encyclopaedic masterpiece and up-to-date standard work on the rodent group of Arvicolinae Gray, ۱۸۲۱ (voles and lemmings) belonging to the family Cricetidae Fischer, ۱۸۱۷ (hamsters). The authors are two experts on these mammals, and are known worldwide by scientists working in mammalogy for their publications. In addition to countless individual articles, B. Kryštufek is best known for his monograph on the ‘Mammals of Turkey and Cyprus’, which he published together with Vladimír Vohralík (Kryštufek and Vohralík, ۲۰۰۱; ۲۰۰۵; ۲۰۰۹). Georgy Shenbrot wrote, among many other books and papers, mainly devoted to desert and steppe rodents, ‘An Atlas of the Geographic Distribution of the Arvicoline Rodents’ in co-operation with Boris Krasnov (Shenbrot and Krasnov, ۲۰۰۵). It is certainly no exaggeration to call the present book, reviewed here, a worthy, up-to-date successor to Hinton's classic ‘Monograph of Voles and Lemmings’ (Hinton, ۱۹۲۶) and Gromov and Polyakov's volume on ‘Voles (Microtinae)’ (Gromov and Polyakov, ۱۹۷۷) in the framework of the ‘Fauna SSSR’ series (which actually always represented the entire group worldwide). So, one can say that a fundamental work on voles appears about every ۵۰ years.  

کلیدواژه ها:

Mammals fauna ، Microtus ، Northern Hemisphere ، Rodentia ، species ، taxonomy