[Taxacom] Nothofagus panbiogeography

[John Grehan]

In my totally biased and partisan opinion article by Michael Heads
"Panbiogeography of Nothofagus (Nothofagaceae): analysis of the main
species massings" published in the Journal of Biogeography is a
must-read. It gets to the core issues of biogeography and shows how
biogeography provides totally unique spatial information that confounds
the propensity of Darwinian biogeographers to theorize this or that
dispersal event based on various assumptions of dispersal, centers of
origin, and age of taxa. He showed that while extralimital fossils do
occur for each of the subgenera, the extant main massings of the
subgenera are the same as the main massings based on all species both
fossil and living, and this pattern is congruent with the main massings
being the result of largely allopatric (vicariant) differentiation with
no substantial dispersal since at least the Upper Cretaceous at which
time the fossil record shows that the four subgenera had evolved. His
global comparison shows that the Nothofagaceae evolved largely as the
South Pacific/ Antarctic vacant in the breakup of a world-wide Fagales
ancestor.

 

Copies are available at
http://www.sciencebuff.org/heads_publications.php or I can send to those
who cannot access the site.

 

John Grehan

 

 

Dr. John R. Grehan

Director of Science and Collections

Buffalo Museum of Science1020 Humboldt Parkway

Buffalo, NY 14211-1193

email: jgrehan at sciencebuff.org

Phone: (716) 896-5200 ext 372

 

Panbiogeography

http://www.sciencebuff.org/biogeography_and_evolutionary_biology.php

Ghost moth research

http://www.sciencebuff.org/systematics_and_evolution_of_hepialdiae.php

Human evolution and the great apes

http://www.sciencebuff.org/human_origin_and_the_great_apes.php