The Great American Biotic Interchange revisited

The Great American Biotic Interchange in birds.

The sudden exchange of mammals over the land bridge between the previously isolated continents of North and South America is among the most celebrated events in the faunal history of the New World. This exchange resulted in the rapid merging of continental mammalian faunas that had evolved in almost complete isolation from each other for tens of millions of years. Yet, the wider importance of l...

Paleoecology of Extinct Xenarthrans and the Great American Biotic Interchange

The Xenarthra were the most successful South American mammals to participate in the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI) and representatives of each family dispersed to at least the middle latitudes in North America. The ability of xenarthrans to insinuate themselves into the North American fauna suggests their ecology was sufficiently different from endemic North American taxa to avoid dir...

Fine-scale niche structure of Neotropical forests reflects a legacy of the Great American Biotic Interchange.

The tendency of species to retain their ancestral niches may link processes that determine community assembly with biogeographic histories that span geological time scales. Biogeographic history is likely to have had a particularly strong impact on Neotropical forests because of the influence of the Great American Biotic Interchange, which followed emergence of a land connection between North a...

Land Mammals and the Great American Interchange

Neotropical mammal diversity and the Great American Biotic Interchange: spatial and temporal variation in South America's fossil record

The vast mammal diversity of the Neotropics is the result of a long evolutionary history. During most of the Cenozoic, South America was an island continent with an endemic mammalian fauna. This isolation ceased during the late Neogene after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, resulting in an event known as the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). In this study, we investigate biogeogr...