Historical Biogeography: The New Synthesis

Historical Biogeography: The New Synthesis

Since Darwin first noted the impact of past ice ages on the distribution of organisms, biogeographers have debated whether Pleistocene glaciations shaped evolutionary patterns. A new synthesis of population genetics and palaeoclimatology promises unprecedented insights into Pleistocene evolutionary history.

Historical Biogeography

Historical biogeography can be divided into two subdisciplines: taxon biogeography and area biogeography. In the former we are interested in reconstructing the geographic distribution history of a particular group of organisms. Questions we may be interested in answering include: Where did the organisms originate? How did they colonize the areas in which they live today? When did they first com...

Historical Biogeography of the New World Solitaires (myadestes Spp.)

—Solitaires (Myadestes spp.) are montane-forest birds that are widely distributed throughout the New World, ranging from Alaska to northern Bolivia and including both Hawaii and the West Indies. To understand the origins of this impressive distribution, we used fi ve mitochondrial gene sequences to reconstruct the historical biogeography of the genus. The resulting phylogeny indicates a rapid i...

The historical biogeography of Mammalia.

Palaeobiogeographic reconstructions are underpinned by phylogenies, divergence times and ancestral area reconstructions, which together yield ancestral area chronograms that provide a basis for proposing and testing hypotheses of dispersal and vicariance. Methods for area coding include multi-state coding with a single character, binary coding with multiple characters and string coding. Ancestr...

Parascript, Parasites and Historical Biogeography