Color photographs in the 16-page insert present a catalog of representative living snake species.

The Introduction includes a brief history of the study of fossil snakes in North America and comments on the major specializations of snakes, the origin of snakes, and the snake skeleton. It is followed by a description of the criteria used to date, identify, and classify fossil snakes. The book closes with an epoch-by-epoch discussion of the zoogeographic, paleoecologic, and evolutionary patterns in Mesozoic, Tertiary, and Quaternary North American fossil snakes. An extraordinary evolutionary explosion of snakes occurred in the Miocene, and evidence from Pleistocene fossil snakes indicates population adjustments to glacial advances and retreats, as well as the remarkable evolutionary stasis of the group during the epoch. An epilogue dwells on the future of snakes in the modern world.

The culmination of a lifetime of research, Fossil Snakes of North America will take its place as the standard reference for the subject.