Rhinoceros Giants: The Paleobiology of Indricotheres

The giant indricothere rhinoceroses - also known by various other names such as Baluchitherium and Paraceratherium - were, at the time this was written, thought to be the largest land mammals that ever lived. More recently, an extinct elephant has claimed that crown, although, frankly, there's not much difference, and it's pretty hard to judge these things accurately anyway.

The book deals thoroughly with the animals, and what we know of them, but it turns out that we don't really know all that much, compared with what we know of say, sabretooths or mammoths. Without a wide range of different creatures to cover, the book arguably includes a fair amount of off-topic padding to fill the (fairly short) page count. It's also not always very well written, with the section on how the animals were discovered, for instance, wandering about in a non-chronological fashion.

Nor does it seem to know whether it's being written for a lay or a technical audience; obscure terms are often helpfully explained, but not always, and at times the book wanders into rather tedious minutiae. The tone is, for the most part, dry, but even here, it's inconsistent, showing occasional bursts of more evocative or chatty prose.

Having said all of this, the information in here is good, and about as thorough as one could hope. I'm really not sure who this is aimed at, and I'm also left with the impression that it may be an overly narrow topic for an entire book, even a short one. So it's hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't have a real interest in these specific animals.