期刊
AMERICAN NATURALIST
卷 175, 期 1, 页码 61-72出版社
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/648607
关键词
Pacific Ocean; biogeography; vicariance; oceanic dispersal
资金
- National Science Foundation (NSF) Assembling the Tree of Life [EF-0334966]
- NSF [DEB-0206562]
- National Geographic Society [7509-03]
In 1947, when Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki hit ground in the Tuamotu archipelago, 102 days and similar to 4,000 km from its point of origin in South America, he inadvertently provided support for one of the most remarkable hypotheses of vertebrate dispersal. Iguanid lizards and boine snakes are ancient Gondwanan lineages whose distribution has been demonstrated to have been influenced by continental drift. Their enigmatic presence on the islands of the Pacific, however, has drawn fantastical conclusions of more than 8,000-km rafting from the Americas. We reexamine the hypothesis of dispersal in light of new molecular data and divergence time estimates. Our results suggest an early Paleogene (50-60 million years) divergence of these groups and the plausibility of an Asiatic or Australian (over land) source. Because the subfossil record indicates that iguanas (but not snakes) were a primary food source of island inhabitants, the absence of these species from islands with a longer history of human presence is unsurprising. Together these findings are taken as evidence of the influence humans have had on these taxa and are put forth as an example of anthropogenic obfuscation of biogeographic history. We suggest that this history is one of terrestrial connections permitting the colonization of the islands of the Pacific.
作者
我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。
推荐
暂无数据