[Taxacom] Real World structure of biodiversity

[John Grehan]

Paper below now available at  ZooNova at https://zoonova.afriherp.org

Grehan, J.R. 2021. The real world structure of biodiversity illustrated by
the biogeography and systematics of some plants, lizards, birds, and
dragonflies.

Abstract
Examples are drawn from regional animal and plant distributions to show how
distributions of taxa are spatially correlated with tectonic structures of
the Earth. Spatial correlations of distributions with Earth's tectonics are
illustrated for the Jurassic Lebombo-Mwenetzi monocline, the plate boundary
between Indo-Australia and the Pacific, and the East Pacific Rise. These
examples illustrate how biodiversity has a coherent spatial and
phylogenetic structure that is not confined to the biological composition
of organisms alone. This tectonic relationship is evidence for the global
structure of biodiversity being directly derived from the geography of
ancestral distributions in the Mesozoic, and shows how some distributional
boundaries have remained geographically stable for tens of millions of
years. The spatial and tectonic correlations show that biodiversity is
phylogeny and biogeography that, together with their correlation with
global tectonics, makes biodiversity an empirical evolutionary reality.