Because it reflects the volume Evolutionary Relationships Among Rodents: a Multidisciplinary Approach that we edited in 1985, nearly 30 years ago, it is a great pleasure for us to introduce this new book, which updates many of the same topics and introduces new approaches, especially in the area of functional morphology.

Our publication followed a meeting held in Paris in the spring of 1984, with about 50 participants coming from different disciplines and countries, but all interested in the palaeontology, biology and evolutionary relationships of families from the orders Rodentia and Lagomorpha. It was a very friendly meeting, with four days in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, on the banks of the Seine and its nearby bistrots, allowing extensive scientific exchanges. Unfortunately, some Eastern colleagues could not join us for obscure political reasons: N. N. Vorontsov was not allowed to leave Moscow for a few days; the same was true for D. Dashzeveg from Oulan Bator. Fortunately, exchanges between international scientists are much easier today.

Our book was dedicated to two leading authorities on the subject at the time: René Lavocat (1909–2007) and Albert ElmerWood (1910–2002). The book has received good success, even though it was highly priced, despite the fact that WPL and JLH did most of the editing work including the ‘camera ready’ mise en page; the publishers also had received some financial support from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation).

Two main topics for challenge and discussion were the Glires concept, which was at this time an open question, and the relationships of African rodents with their possible relatives in South America. Also, for some families, a documented review was proposed by different specialists, with the notable exception of the murids.

It must be added that, at the time, relationships and communications between palaeontologists and other biologists were poor: a type of reciprocal ignorance between the two communities was the rule. Thus, the meeting contributed notably to breaching the barrier between fossil specialists and those biologists studying the living world. Studies of genetics and molecular phylogeny were still in the early stages: techniques allowing exploitation of the molecular clock concept (1965) had only recently been solved.