Paleobiogeography Topics in Geobiology Series Editor: Neil H
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Paleobiogeography Topics in Geobiology Series Editor: Neil H. Landman, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York Douglas S. Jones, University of Horida, Gainesville, Florida Current volumes in this series Volume 4 THE GREAT AMERICAN BIOTIC INTERCHANGE Edited by Francis G. Stehli and S. David Webb Volume 5 MAGNETTE BIOMINERALIZATION AND MAGNETORECEPTION IN ORGANISMS A New Biomagnetism Edited by Joseph L. Kirschvink, Douglas S. Jones and Bruce J. McFadden Volume 6 NAUTILUS The Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil Edited by W. Bruce Saunders and Neil H. Landman Volume 7 HETEROCHRONY IN EVOLUTION A Multidisciplinary Approach Edited by Michael L. McKinney Volume 8 GALApAGOS MARINE INVERTEBRATES Taxonomy, Biogeography and Evolution in Darwin's Islands Edited by Matthew 1. James Volume 9 TAPHONOMY Releasing the Data Locked in the Fossil Record Edited by Peter A. Allison and Derek E. G. Briggs Volume 10 ORIGIN AND EARLY EVOLUTION OF THE METAZOA Edited by Jere H. Lipps and Philip W. Signor Volume II ORGANIC GEOCHEMISTRY Principles and Applications Edited by Michael H. Engel and Stephen A. Macko Volume 12 THE TERTIARY RECORD OF RODENTS IN NORTH AMERICA William Korth Volume 13 AMMONOID PALEOBIOGRAPHY Edited by Neil H. Landman, Kazushige Tanabe and Richard Arnold Davis Volume 14 NEOGENE PALEONTOLOGY OF THE MANONGA VALLEY, TANZANIA A Window into the Evolutionary History of East Africa Edited by Terry Harrison Volume IS ENVIRONMENTAL MICROPALEONTOLOGY Edited by Ronald E. Martin Volume 16 PALEOBIOGEOGRAPHY Bruce S. Lieberman Paleobiogeography Bruce S. Lieberman University 0/ Kansas Lawrence. Kansas Springer Science+Business Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liebennan, Bruce S. Paleobiogeography: Using fossil to study global change, plate tectonics, and evolutionIBruce S. Liebennan p. cm. - (Topics in geobiology; v. 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4613-6867-0 ISBN 978-1-4615-4161-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4615-4161-5 I. Paleobiogeography. I. Title. 11. Series QE721.2.P24 L54 1999 560-dc21 99-055322 ISBN 978-1-4613-6867-0 © 2000 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, New York in 2000 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 2000 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any fonn or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written pennission from the Publisher For Paulyn and Sarah Foreword by Daniel R. Brooks This book represents the first major attempt to integrate the "space, time, and form" of historical biogeographers with the "tempo and mode" of paleontol ogists. The author is young, as befits a pioneer, but he is uniquely qualified for this undertaking, having been successively a student of Steve Gould, Niles Eldredge, and Elisabeth Vrba (and now plying his trade at the same institution that houses Charles Michener and Ed Wiley). His published repertoire includes theoretical studies on macroevolution, punctuated equilibrium, and historical biogeography, as well as monographic studies on the taxonomy, systematics, and phylogeny of trilobites. Everything we have learned about biological evolution, and everything we hope to learn about it, is based on the recognition that the past leaves its mark on the present, and does so in such a striking way that we can actually understand at least part of what happened in the past by finding these unique historical marks in the present. Patterns of inheritance from one generation of fruit flies to the next in a series of glass vials in a laboratory are just as historical as the sequence of fossils in a rock outcropping exposed by the cutting action of running water. Long before the advent of modern evolutionary thinking, naturalists were impressed by the fact that biological diversity occurred nonrandomly across the Earth. In fact, a hallmark of a great naturalist is knowing where to find things. Thus it is no surprise that the first two major lines of evolutionary thought, Lamarckism and Darwinism, reserved a special explanatory role for the relationship between geography and evolution. Lamarck felt that wherever a species happened to evolve, it would deal with changes in the local environment by evolving the appropriate adaptations (in his wonderful Panglossian world, nothing ever went extinct). Darwin, on the other hand, felt that species would deal with changes in their local environments to the best extent possible given the constraints of their inherited variation, and might survive or might go extinct. In both cases, the historical record left by the survivors should, among other things, provide a strong imprint of a causal relation between Earth history and biological history. Biogeographic studies have thus been a major part of evolutionary biology from the beginning and remain a critical cornerstone today. With the advent of evolutionary thinking, paleontologists realized fully that where could also mean when. They became the curators of the "evolutionary epic" of evolved biological diversity deployed across space and through time. vii viii Foreword The mid-1960s to mid-1970s witnessed a revolution in paleontology, initiated by the theory of punctuated equilibrium proposed in 1972 by Niles Eldredge and Steve Gould. This rapidly led to the elaboration of a hierarchical view of evolution, promoted most strongly by Eldredge, Gould, and Elisabeth Vrba, that included a renewed appreciation for the reality of macroevolu tionary phenomena and the role of ontogenetic constraints in evolutionary diversification. The emerging field of paleoecology, championed by such luminaries as David Raup, John Sepkoski, Art Boucot, and Dave Jablonski, produced significant insights into the nature of biotic turnover and replace ment. This has led to a widespread belief, synthesized by Joel Cracraft in 1985, that geological evolution has played a major role in determining the rate of diversification of life on thiS planet, through speciation mediated by fragmentation ofancestral species owing to geological evolution and extinction owing to changes in environmental harshness on regional to global scales. Studies by the past generation of paleontologists confirm that the deployment of biodiversity through time involved episodes of biotic expansion and habitat fragmentation leading to speciation alternating with episodes of regional to global-scale extinction. At the same time as this new paleontology was emerging, three events energized biogeography, the study of the deployment of biodiversity in space. The first was the publication of the theory of island biogeography, which provided an analytical and quantitative basis for ecological biogeography, a discipline rich in tradition and narrative accounts about the relationships between current environments and the number and relative abundance of species in particular areas. The second was the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics and continental drift by geologists. This breakthrough permitted biologists to recapture a wealth of ideas linking geographic distributions of related species to general distribution patterns on a global scale. From 1890 to 1940 general biogeographic distribution patterns were explained by reference to the theory of continental drift. Faced with hostility from the geological community, however, historical biogeographers aban doned continental drift for land bridges or chance dispersal across fixed geographical barriers mediated by climate. The third was the linking of the methods of phylogenetic systematics developed by Willi Hennig to biogeogr pahic studies. A seminal study by Lars Brundin provided the first modern evidence of what we now explain as trans-Gondwanian distribution patterns mirrored in the distributions of extant taxa. Gareth Nelson wrote an article in 1969 on "the problem of historical biogeography," noting that if one estimated ancestral distributions by adding together the distributions of sister species and designating the combined distribution as the ancestral distribution at the node on the phylogenetic tree linking those sister species, the implied geographic distributions indicated great antiquity for many modern groups. Was it possible that historically associated remnants of ancient biotas existed in geographic areas that are now disjunct but which were connected in the distant past? Foreword ix The merger of phylogenetic systematics and the new paleontology has been exciting. As anticipated in the early 1970s by noted systematists such as Eldredge, Wiley, and Colin Patterson, fossils have been willing to give up their secrets as readily as specimens representing living species. That fossils provide data critical for the resolution of key aspects of phylogenetic analysis including living species has been amply demonstrated by systematists such as Michael Donoghue, Jacques Gauthier, Arnold Kluge, and Michael Novacek. Phylogenetic hypotheses based on fossil species have been used to evaluate hypotheses of the age of Qrigin and diversification for particular taxa and to address the question of whether or not diversification and extinction are coupled and/or episodic. These studies have shown that there is a great deal of concordance between the temporal dimension discovered by paleontologists and the morphospace dimension inferred from phylogenetic analysis. In fact, this concordance is strong enough that molecular evolutionary biologists