[Taxacom] Chatham Islands biogeography

[John Grehan]

Anyone interested in a copy of the following article please let me know.

Cheers, John Grehan

Gehan 2021 The Chatham Islands (Rēkohu) biota as a fragment of East
Gondwana biodiversity. The Weta 55: 48-61.

Informal abstract

While the modern Chatham Islands is a geographic outlier, this cannot be
said of its biodiversity. The foregoing examples illustrate how the Chatham
Islands is an integral component of both regional and global biodiversity.
The Alpine Fault correlation shows how an originally contiguous
distribution between the mainland and the Chatham Islands has been
displaced by lateral fault movement beginning about 23 Ma. The endemism and
phylogenetic relationships of living Chatham Islands taxa, the molecular
dates for clades that are older than the modern islands, and the geological
evidence for continuous land in the area, all support the idea that the
Chatham Islands biota is derived from widespread ancestors rather than
stray derivatives from mainland New Zealand. A Gondwana timeline for
Chatham Islands biodiversity is incredible only if one fails to recognize
that organisms are dispersible and able to survive and persist within
geographically and geologically unstable environments over long geological
periods.