From the tiny shrew to the giant elephant

"We thought that, when it came to mammals, we knew it all. But we've just discovered two new macaques and a new barking deer in Arunachal Pradesh. We now know that we have more than 440 mammals in India. And there must be more. We need many more Indians working on many more discrete taxa. If they do that then we'll have a truer picture. We work with an encyclopaedia of ignorance to guide us. Nature has so many things and we are only scraping the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we see." - Vivek Menon, author, 'Indian Mammals; A Field Guide' talks to Manjula Narayan about the wild asses of Kutch, bats as great pollinators, India having the largest squirrels in the world, and about putting together this impressive volume that includes in depth information about every known mammal in the country from the tiny shrew to the large elephant.