Creatures of India: Guide to Animals in India with up-to-date systematics
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Date
2014
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New Delhi Publishers
Abstract
Indian Biodiversity, albeit being one of the richest in the world with three of the 32 �Biodiversity Hotspots�, is unfortunately in a serious sate of neglect from the administration and the general public alike. Four big-sized animals, Pink-headed Duck, Himalayan Mountain Quail, Lesser Indian Rhinoceros and Indian Cheetah, have gone extinct in the last century alone. IUCN enlist India at 7th rank of shame-list, countries struggling to protect its biodiversity. With almost 18% of world population cramming into less than 2% of area, sub-continental forest cover has been steadily shrinking, so as its biodiversity. This report is first of its kind in India, a comprehensive assessment of status and trends of commonly found animals in the subcontinent with its up-to-date taxonomic positions, overview on the systematics, bio-prospecting and conservation. This work also serves as a �binomen dictionary�-for looking up binomial names of virtually every animal species that you might encounter in daily life in India. The idea to write this book sprang from one of the class assignments as part of BSS.506: Biosystematics and Biodiversity course here at the Central University of Punjab, Bathinda. The assignment was to make a database of Indian Biodiversity. While I appreciate the passion that my students put in the creation of database, most of their entries were well-described taxa from North America and Europe-presumably obtained through online resources, highlighting the dire need to categorize Indian Biodiversity. Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has published few checklists of animal taxa in India but those did not include several of the important animal phyla. Checklists merely enlist scientific names without common name or any other information and therefore their utility in practical identification is extremely limited. This inspired me to write a book with following focuses: 1. Limit to the macroscopic extant species that are commonly found in nature throughout the subcontinent. 2. Species of human importance; a note on bio-prospecting that highlights commercially cultivated/medicinally important/culturally significant taxa discussed in each chapter introduction. 3. Species of conservation importance; a note on conservation discussed in each chapter introduction and common names are appropriately superscribed throughout (CR: Critically Endangered, EN: Endangered, VU: Vulnerable and NT: Near Threatened.) 4. Example families and genera covering all iconic metazoan phyla and phylogenetic trees to illustrate evolutionary relationships between them; to aid in understanding and appreciation of animal systematics. 5. Designated animals representing national and state level administration. This book is still incomplete; as a privileged reader who appreciates the biodiversity, a column in all the tables are waiting for you to complete; �Name in Regional Language�. With seventeen official languages, India is so linguistically diverse that if I sought out to include a multilingual list of taxa covered in this book, it would have doubled the weight of this book and wasted a number of pages! Instead I made this book like a class-activity notebook; it is for you to find, identify and complete the name in local dialect/regional language in the space provided (Activity: 1), a simple, yet pedagogically-sound method.
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Bast, Felix (2014) Creatures of India: Guide to Animals in India with up-to-date systematics.