ABSTRACT
T HE YOSSIL MAAIMALS of Africa were virtually unknown until the latter half of the nineteenth century when a number of French scientists, notably Thomas and Pomel, began to describe material from the northwest African coastal region. At this time the equatorial and southern parts of the continent were paleontologically unexplored and it was not until the first two decades of the present century that systematic descriptions of mammal fossils from this region started to appear. The valuable bibliography of the fossil mammals of Africa by Hopwood and Hollyfield (1954) lists almost 450 living and extinct species and subspecies of Pleistocene mammals recorded up to 1950; the writer has records of a further 59 names to the end of 1960. The dates on which each variety was first mentioned have been analyzed in the histogram given in Figure 1, which thus presents some idea of the activity of paleontological description, decade by decade.
