The auditory cortex of the rat is becoming an increasingly popular model system for studies of experience-dependent receptive field plasticity. However, the relative position of various fields within the auditory core and the receptive field organization within each field have yet to be fully described in the normative case. In this study, the macro and micro-organizational features of the auditory cortex were studied in pentobarbital anesthetized adult rats with a combination of physiological and anatomical methods. Dense microelectrode mapping procedures were used to identify the relative position of five tonotopically organized fields within the auditory core: AI, the posterior auditory field (PAF), the anterior auditory field (AAF), the ventral auditory field (VAF), and the supra-rhinal auditory field (SRAF). AI and AAF both featured short latency, sharply tuned responses with predominantly monotonic intensity-response functions. SRAF and PAF were both characterized by longer latency, broadly tuned responses. VAF directly abutted the ventral boundary of AI but was almost exclusively comprised of low threshold non-monotonic intensity-tuned responses. Dual injection of retrograde tracers into AI and VAF were used to demonstrate that the sources of thalamic input from the medial geniculate body to each area were essentially non-overlapping. An analysis of receptive field parameters beyond characteristic frequency (CF) revealed independent spatially ordered representations for features related to spectral tuning, intensity tuning, and onset response properties in AI, AAF, VAF and SRAF. These data demonstrate that despite its greatly reduced physical scale, the rat auditory cortex features a surprising degree of organizational complexity and detail.