Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana comprise the region known as the Guianas in northern South America. The first significant publication that included mammals was by Carl Linnaeus in 1758 with the tenth edition of “Systema Naturae” that introduced the binomial nomenclature system for animals and included 16 holotype specimens from the Guianas. The first comprehensive biological exploration took place in the 1840s by Robert and Richard Schomburgk during a geographic survey of the boundaries of British Guiana that included floral and faunal collections. Scientific publications became more common by the beginning of the 1900s primarily because of the taxonomic studies of Oldfield Thomas at the British Museum of Natural History. A tropical field station was established in Guyana during the early twentieth century by William Beebe from the New York Zoological Society. A mammal collecting program was begun in 1961 by Randolph Peterson at the Royal Ontario Museum and continues to this day. In the mid-1960s, scientific interest in mammals of French Guiana was also renewed, initially with bats by André Brosset from Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The first modern taxonomic monograph of mammals for a country in South America was published in 1978 by Antonius Husson at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie for Suriname. This resurgence in studying the mammals of the Guianas has been dominated by foreign researchers. But more recently with the establishment of local graduate programs, there is a shift to home-grown expertise in one of the most pristine tropical regions of the world.