Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
British naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) brought with him
hundreds of plant specimens from a voyage of exploration to Antarctica
and the southern continents. After analyzing them (Hooker 1844-1860), he
found that it was common for the same families and even genera to be
present in widely separated areas as New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania,
and Patagonia. When describing the flora of New Zealand, Hooker decided
that species were surviving relicts of a once widespread flora that had grown
on all the southern continents. He even suggested that these lands had
been joined together, and geological events had caused their breakup. In
modern terms, he was suggesting vicariance as a historical explanation
(Briggs 1995; Brown and Lomolino 1998). The need to postulate former land
bridgestoexplaindisjunctdistributionsbyHookerandotherso-calledexten-
sionists was overshadowed by Darwin and Wallace, and he had to abandon
his ideas (Funk 2004). However, Hooker is another precursor of vicariance
biogeography (Briggs and Humphries 2004).
Hermann von Ihering (1850-1930) was a German zoologist who lived
in southern Brazil for more than four decades. On the basis of his obser-
vations of the freshwater fauna of southern South America, New Zealand,
and Africa, as well as his geological knowledge, he came to be dissatisfied
with Darwinian's dispersal over preexisting barriers. He postulated, instead,
that biotic disjunctions could be explained by the existence of former land
bridges that joined areas now widely separated. In
Die Geschichte des At-
lantisches Ozeans
(von Ihering 1927), he delineated Archatlantis (North At-
lantic), Archhelenis (South America), and Lemuria (Madagascar and India),
which existed from the Cretaceous to the Eocene. Von Ihering was one of
the earliest vicariance biogeographers, recognizing biotic affinities between
southeastern Brazil and Chile, areas that he suggested were part of Archip-
lata, an ancient territory (Choudhury and Pérez-Ponce de León 2005). Von
Ihering (1927) summarized his main biogeographic ideas while reconstruct-
ing the configuration of the continents and land bridges during the Creta-
ceous. Until recently, it was common to ridicule the ideas of von Ihering and
others as “land bridge builders,” but this is inaccurate because former lands
were only a small part of their analyses (Heads 2005a).
Argentinean paleontologist Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) was an
opponent of Holarcticism, the approach that situates the origin of all taxa in
the Northern Hemisphere. On the basis of paleontological findings made by
him and his brother Carlos, he worked out the stratigraphy of South Amer-
ica. As a result of a systematic overestimation of the ages of the strata,
