Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Phylogenetics of characters and groups, and the classification of taxa
- 3 Problems in understanding metatherian evolution
- 4 Form–function, and ecological and behavioral morphology in Metatheria
- 5 Background to the analysis of metatherian cruropedal evidence
- 6 Mesozoic and Cenozoic: Fossil tarsals of ameridelphians unassociated with teeth
- 7 Cruropedal attributes of living and fossil families of metatherians
- 8 Taxa and phylogeny of Metatheria
- 9 Paleobiogeography and metatherian evolution
- References
- Index
9 - Paleobiogeography and metatherian evolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Phylogenetics of characters and groups, and the classification of taxa
- 3 Problems in understanding metatherian evolution
- 4 Form–function, and ecological and behavioral morphology in Metatheria
- 5 Background to the analysis of metatherian cruropedal evidence
- 6 Mesozoic and Cenozoic: Fossil tarsals of ameridelphians unassociated with teeth
- 7 Cruropedal attributes of living and fossil families of metatherians
- 8 Taxa and phylogeny of Metatheria
- 9 Paleobiogeography and metatherian evolution
- References
- Index
Summary
Nowhere in biology is the misleading and arbitrary use of ‘parsimony’ so disabling as in vicariance and panbiogeography, with their determined exclusion of virtually all biological data on vagility, reproductive strategy, niche-width, and so on.
Kirsch (1990, p. 162)I have attempted to sketch how these oppositions (selection v. orthogenesis, ecology v. history) might be resolved if dichotomous views of causation are abandoned for a more complex view emphasizing interacting mutually contingent networks of causes. In practice achieving such a synthesis will require a breakdown of the conceptual and methodological boundaries between biogeography, evolutionary biology, systematics, ecology and geology.
Gray (1989, p. 804)Few constraints limit and guide the nature of macro-and megaevolutionary patterns of terrestrial organisms as decisively as the nature of distribution, isolation, and connectedness of various land masses. Such important geographic factors are partly behind climatic and subsequently the environmental change that drives faunal extinctions and new ecological opportunities through ecological release (Van Valen, 1978), in other words opportunitybased adaptive evolution. These are some of the reasons why few subjects have engendered as much interest in a wide variety of subdisciplines of natural history as the geographic enigma of marsupial distribution and evolution through time and space. Given the background of the Cretaceous spread of the angiosperms (Brenner, 1976) and the faunal upheavals at the beginning and end of the Eocene in the northern hemisphere (Stucky, 1990; Krause & Maas, 1990, etc.) the occurrence of marsupials in space and time has been one of the knottiest of puzzles in mammalian paleobiogeography.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995