Surprisingly engaging while also in-depth. This is a really quite beautiful work covering a tiny slice of our evolution from fishes to land-dwellers to mammals, primarily via adaptations in small skull bones. Through that journey Shubin describes what we know and how we know it, with fascinating side trips into geology, microbiology, history, and more.

This is not a niche book; I think it would be quite suitable for someone just learning about evolution or someone (like me) who thought he wouldn't get anything useful out of yet another book on the subject (I was wrong).