Taming the shrew

Shrews (Soricidae) make up about I0To of the extant taxa of mammals. During their long history they have preserved many primitive characters and at the same time successfully competed with more derived groups of small mammals. Despite their importance in fossil and recent maillma-lian communities of the Northern Hemisphere, the number of studies concerning the shrews is disproportionally small. A volume devoted to the biology of shrews which contains contributions presented during a symposium organizedin Powdermill (United States) was published some years ago (Meritt et al. 1994). Of the 45 papers only three concerned palaeontological material and a few others were connected indirectly to the problems of evolution of this group. The book Evolution of Shrews published four years later has a more limited scope, being devoted entirely to the problems of evolution of Sońcidae, but its aim was more ambitious. This volume was dedicated to Professor Zdzisław Pucek on his 65th bithday and contains 14 review articles prepared by an international group of specialists. In 1949 the Polish zoologist August Dehnel discovered the existence of important seasonal changes in the dimensions of the brain case in Sorex araneus. This unexpected observation wa