The rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands of tropical America teem with fishes, in both abundance and variety. The thousands of species who inhabit these waterways exhibit a bewildering display of physiological, morphological, and behavioral specializations. Ecology and Evolution of Amazonian Fishes explains how the freshwater fishes of South America rose to become the most diverse continental vertebrate fauna on Earth. The 46 contributing authors, all experts on particular fish groups, combined efforts to produce four novel and taxonomically coordinated datasets: a comprehensive time-calibrated phylogeny with geographic ranges and behavioral and ecological traits for 6,342 species in 97 families and 880 genera, as well as a syncretic chronology of all the seminal paleogeographic events and conditions in South America over the past 100 million years. These ecological and evolutionary data are used to evaluate prominent theories on the ecology and evolution of South American freshwater fishes.

Dr. James S. Albert is a Full Professor and Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, with 36 years of experience collecting and documenting tropical fish diversity. Dr. Albert is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications with more than 13,000 literature citations, with descriptions of 52 species and 11 genera new to science. Dr. Albert has co-edited three previous books on the diversity and evolution of Amazonian fishes.

Dr. Roberto E. Reis is a Full Professor of Zoology and Systematics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, with 38 years of experience collecting and documenting tropical fish diversity. Dr. Reis is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications with more than 15,000 literature citations, with descriptions of 141 new species and 12 new genera. Dr. Reis has co-edited three previous books on the diversity, taxonomy and systematics of Amazonian fishes.