Models of historical biogeography and continental biochronology

Historical Biogeography

Historical biogeography can be divided into two subdisciplines: taxon biogeography and area biogeography. In the former we are interested in reconstructing the geographic distribution history of a particular group of organisms. Questions we may be interested in answering include: Where did the organisms originate? How did they colonize the areas in which they live today? When did they first com...

Archosaur Footprints – Potential for Biochronology of Triassic Continental Sequences

Historically, footprint-bearing localities in eastern and western North America and southern Thuringia and northern Bavaria have played pivotal roles in Triassic archosaur footprint research. In a nearly complete sequence of formations and footprint-horizons in the Moenkopi Group (U.S.A.), Newark Supergroup (U.S.A. and Canada), and Buntsandstein, Muschelkalk, and Keuper groups (Olenekian to Nor...

Parascript, Parasites and Historical Biogeography

Historical Biogeography of American Beech

American beech (Fagus grandifolia), now a centerpiece species of the eastern deciduous forest, has had a continually changing historical biogeography. This paper reviews the paleoecology, the presettlement occurrence, the modern range, and the current abundance pattern of beech. It synthesizes these four databases into maps representing the distribution and abundance of beech at specific period...

The historical biogeography of Mammalia.

Palaeobiogeographic reconstructions are underpinned by phylogenies, divergence times and ancestral area reconstructions, which together yield ancestral area chronograms that provide a basis for proposing and testing hypotheses of dispersal and vicariance. Methods for area coding include multi-state coding with a single character, binary coding with multiple characters and string coding. Ancestr...