[Taxacom] rewriting history

[John Grehan]

Brendon, You cited the  paper by Petrulevicius as an example of fossils
rewriting history, but I read the paper and see nothing of the sort. All
they did was to add a couple of extralimital fossil records, in Europe and
Argentina. How is that 'rewriting' anything other than a larger range than
that of the living representatives which have a classic Indian Ocean range
(including the European record). All that has been added is S AMerica which
makes
for a wider range and is consistent with a Gondwana range involving
formation of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The authors assert that "These
dragonflies were probably spread in the warm regions of the world during
the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene and restricted in the Neogene to
intertropical Africa", but why not sometime earlier?  Why just Late
Cretacous and Paleogene? Because they read the fossil record as the literal
temporal record, even though their new discovery shows that it is not.

Cheers, John