Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.16
Biogeographic analysis of South America by Morrone and Coscarón (1998).
(a) Areas of endemism; (b) reconciled trees minimizing the number of terminal taxa added;
(c-d) reconciled trees minimizing the number of losses; (e) paralogy-free subtree analysis.
AMA, Amazonian subregion; ATL, Atlantic Forest province; CAA, Caatinga province; CAR,
Caribbean subregion; CER, Cerrado province; CHA, Chacoan province; DES, Coastal
Desert province; PAR, Parana province.
According to this hypothesis, the four areas with open vegetation (Coastal
Desert, Caatinga, Cerrado, and Chaco) are situated basally in the general area
cladogram, whereas the forest areas, despite today being clearly disjunct, consti-
tute a monophyletic group. This seems to corroborate the preliminary hypothes-
is (Morrone and Coscarón 1996) on the progressive development of the diagonal
of open vegetation, which in turn fragmented the primitive forest into two blocks:
Caribbean-Amazonian and Parana-Atlantic.
