Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(1910) postulated that the Atlantic Ocean originated with the separation of
two continents that formerly constituted a single landmass. In 1912 Alfred
Lothar Wegener (1880-1930) published
Die Entstehung der Kontinente und
Ozeane
, where he postulated the existence of a former giant supercontin-
ent, which in later editions he named Pangaea. His ideas were not accepted
for several decades until the pioneering work of Hess (1962) provided geo-
logical evidence for continental drift.
In the United States, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a zoogeo-
graphic school originated with William Diller Matthew (1871-1930), founded
on the dispersal of organisms over a static Earth. Simpson, Darlington, and
Myers are its main authors (Nelson and Ladiges 2001; Williams 2007b).
It has been named the New York school of zoogeography (Croizat 1958b,
1984b) and Holarcticism (Reig 1981).
Matthew was a Canadian paleontologist. His most widely known work is
Climate and Evolution
(Matthew 1915). He opposed land bridges across the
oceans, advocating Holarctic centers of origin for all terrestrial vertebrates
and successive dispersal events to Africa, to Australia through southeastern
Asia, and to the Americas through the Bering Strait. Matthew summarized
his theses as follows:
1. Secular climatic change has been an important factor in the evolution of
land vertebrates and the principal known cause of their present distribu-
tion.
2. The principal lines of migration in later geological epochs have been radial
from Holarctic centers of dispersal.
3. Thegeographicchangesrequiredtoexplainthepresentdistributionofland
vertebrates are not extensive and for the most part do not affect the per-
manence of the oceans as defined by the continental shelf.
4. The theories of alternations of moist and uniform with arid and zonal cli-
mates, as elaborated by Chamberlin, are in exact accord with the course
of evolution of land vertebrates, when interpreted with due allowance for
the probable gaps in the record.
5. The numerous hypothetical land bridges in temperate tropical and south-
ern regions, connecting continents now separated by deep oceans, which
have been advocated by various authors, are improbable and unneces-
