Book review: Penney D, Selden PA (2011) Fossil Spiders: the evolutionary history of a mega-diverse order. Monograph Series, Volume 1. Siri Scientific Press, Manchester, 128 pp., 87 photographs (hardback)
نویسنده
چکیده
Prior to the publication of the book reviewed here, the only books dealing specifically with fossil spiders have been primarily taxonomic monographs, such as those on Dominican and Baltic amber inclusions by Wunderlich (1988, 2004), or broader palaeobiological studies on a particular assemblage, such as Dominican amber spiders by Penney (2008). The coverage of fossil spiders in books on extant spiders is usually restricted to one or two pages at most, and more often than not these include serious errors. This new book is quite different and fills a long standing void in the arachnological literature. The book begins with an introduction to spiders from a palaeontological perspective, putting their geological longevity into context of the other known fossil and extant arachnid orders, including comparative data for numbers of described extant and fossil species for all orders. The relative diversity of spider sub-orders today is compared with that of the past. The authors provide reasoned support for the importance of fossil spiders in addressing large-scale palaeobiological questions on a global scale, and over long periods of time, including how information on past changes in biogeographical distributions can be correlated with changes in palaeoclimatological factors and the potential of this for predicting the consequences of current climate change. Information is also provided on how the fossil spiders are dated. ZooKeys 119: 73–76 (2011)
منابع مشابه
A long-awaited book about fossil arachnids Book review: Dunlop JA, Penney D (2012) Fossil Arachnids. Monograph Series Volume 2. Siri Scientific Press, Manchester, 192 pp.
For a long time palaeoarthropodology has been ticking over in the background with publications mainly restricted to taxonomic papers in scientific journals. The deficit of more general overview works as a resource of background information for neontologists as well as palaeontologists was recently addressed for insects (Rasnitsyn and Quicke 2002; Grimaldi and Engel 2005). Now, for the first tim...
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The Seychelles islands are located in the Indian Ocean, some 1,500 kilometres east of Africa and northeast of the island of Madagascar. They are particularly interesting from a biogeographical perspective, with ancient affinities to Africa and Asia, recent colonizing species from the Indo-Pacific and modern introductions. Until recently, relatively little was known about the biodiversity of the...
متن کاملFossil spiders.
Over the last three decades, the fossil record of spiders has increased from being previously biased towards Tertiary ambers and a few dubious earlier records, to one which reveals a much greater diversity in the Mesozoic, with many of the modern families present in that era, and with clearer evidence of the evolutionary history of the group. We here record the history of palaeoarachnology and ...
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عنوان ژورنال:
دوره 2 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011