Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3.3
Transition between two regional faunas, showing that each fauna con-
sists of exclusive, transitional, and shared families; and transitional and shared fam-
ilies consist of exclusive, transitional, and shared genera (modified from Darlington
1957:453).
Darlington's(1965)bookbestsumsuptwoproblemsofclassicdispersal-
ism: a pre-plate tectonic version of geology (that since the Late Cretaceous,
southern continents have not been in contact) and the assumption that a
taxonomic group is as old as its earliest fossil representative (Humphries
and Parenti 1999).
George Sprague Myers (1905-1985) was a U.S. ichthyologist. As a
teenager, he was volunteer assistant at the American Museum of Natural
History, where he came under the influence of Karl Schmidt, one of Mat-
thew's disciples. Myers (1938) divided true freshwater fishes into primary
and secondary classes; the former are physiologically incapable of surviving
in seawater, whereas the latter may occasionally enter the sea. Myers's
treatment of freshwater fishes was praised by several authors, and Darling-
ton (1957) admitted that it has been a key contribution to the success of his
treatment of the distributional patterns of freshwater fishes. By the 1960s,
Myers (1963) abandoned “the Gospel according to St. Matthew” (Nelson
and Ladiges 2001:400), rejecting notions of continental stability in favor of
continental drift.
