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Mammal genomics has progressed at an uneven pace—half sloth, half cheetah—owing to various technical obstacles, including the complexity of eukaryotic genomes , difficulties obtaining high-quality DNA from wild animals , and conflicting evolutionary signatures . The 2022 completion of the telomere-to-telomere (T2T) human genome assembly was fueled by ultralong-read sequencing techniques only dreamt of two decades ago when the initial draft was published. Generating high-quality genomes across diverse mammal species is now possible, enabling the exploration of tightly packed, regulatory, and repetitive DNA regions. The mammalverse comprises ∼6500 living species and >180 million years of genome evolution, ripe for investigation . On pages 366, 364, 371, 372, 363, and 365 of this issue, Christmas et al. , Kaplow et al. , Osmanski et al. , Wilder et al. , Moon et al. , and Foley et al. , respectively …