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INTRODUCTION
… Climate appears to limit the range of many animals, though there is some reason to believe that in many cases it is not the climate itself so much as the change of vegetation consequent on climate which produces the effect…. Where barriers have existed from a remote epoch, they will at first have kept back certain animals from coming in contact with each other; but when the assemblage of organisms on the two sides of the barrier have, after many ages, come to form a balanced organic whole, the destruction of the barrier may lead to a very partial intermingling of the peculiar forms of the two regions …
At the time that Wallace published his thoughts on The Geographical Distribution of Animals with a study of the Relations of Living and Extinct Faunas as elucidating the past changes of the Earth's surface, current belief was in the fixed position of the continents. Since the acceptance of plate tectonic theory during the late 1960s large numbers of publications have appeared concerning the biogeography of Old World Tertiary terrestrial vertebrates. These attempt to take account of the effects of past continental movement, the effects on climate of different land/sea configuration, and the effects of changes in ocean currents on marine and terrestrial ecosystems. This chapter considers how the Neogene vertebrates responded to climate change.
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