PALEOGEOGRAPHY OF THE ANTILLES AND ORIGIN OF WEST INDIAN TERRESTRIAL VERTEBRATES1
By S. Blair Hedges. 2006
144 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The fauna of the West Indies includes more than 1300 native terrestrial vertebrate species and is characterized by high levels of endemism. Several theories have been proposed to explain how these animals arrived to the islands, including dispersal, vicariance, and land bridges. The dispersal theory proposes that most of the West Indian terrestrial biota arrived by flying or by flotsam. The vicariance theory suggests that there was a proto-Antillean land mass, or masses, connecting North and South America in the late Cretaceous that traveled eastward as the Caribbean geologic plate developed and carried an ancient biota with it. One widely discussed land bridge theory proposes that much of the Antillean biota originated by dispersal over an unbroken dry land connection, the Aves Ridge, between South America and the Greater Antilles 35–33 Ma. Geologic evidence cannot unambiguously support or refute any of these models, despite claims to the contrary. Other evidence bearing on these three theories,...
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f70f56864743e272a268d3a749c175e49bb92cee
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Paleontology
- A. Graham
- J. Zrzavý
- S. Blair Hedges
- Rafael Zardoya
- S. Trape
- Solny A. Adalsteinsson
- L. Vitt
- W. Branch
Citations in the corpus
- The role of land bridges, ancient environments, and migrations in the assembly of the North American flora (2018, background): “Hedges (2006) believes neither the geological nor the biogeographic data support the Aves Ridge land bridge model.”
- Biogeography of the Mesoamerican Cichlidae (Teleostei: Heroini): colonization through the GAARlandia land bridge and early diversification (2013, background): “Older reviews of amphibians and reptiles based mostly on immunological distances claim that this peak is absent (Hedges, 2006; but based on data in Hedges, 1996), while reviews of mammals admitted that the evidence from mammalian phylogenies so far does not add to the argument of dispersal versus…”
- Molecular phylogeny, classification, and biogeography of snakes of the Family Leptotyphlopidae (Reptilia, Squamata) (2009, background): “This would have been facilitated by ocean currents which flow in a northerly direction around western Cuba, past the southern tip of Florida, to the Bahamas (Hedges 2001; 2006; Iturralde-Vinent & MacPhee 1999).”