Geography and Evolution

Australia

The Wollemi pine of Australia, thought to have been extinct for over 100 million years. It is an araucarian tree, over 100 feet high, surviving in wild country only 100 miles or so from Australia's largest city, Sydney. Here is a recent story: From the brink of extinction to your flower pot: the Wollemi pine of Australia.BBC News OnLine, September 25, 2003. Here is an earlier story, also from National Geographic News, March 2003.
• Large Pleistocene horned tortoise from Lord Howe Island: Meiolania

• Songbirds had their origin (all of them) in Australasia. Press release. The paper is Barker, F. K., et al. 2004. Phylogeny and diversification of the largest avian radiation. PNAS 101: 11040-11045, and should now be on the Web [RC: get URL]..

• Thylacoleo, the marsupial "lion"
  • Images of fossils from Naracoorte caves.
  • How big was it?. Big.
  • Thylacoleo was a pretty good carnivore. National Geographic news, March 5, 2004. There's a bit of a "straw man" here. Thylacoleo has been regarded as a pretty good carnivore for quite a while. Also, it's difficult (for me) to believe that the giant Australian monitor was only as big as the Komodo dragon: we have bones, after all. The world's expert, Peter Molnar, suggests that it about as big as a large crocodile.
  • The bite strength of Thylacoleo BBC News OnLine. April 5, 2005. Hidden in this news item is the claim that marsupials have an intrinsically stronger bite than placentals. That's much more significant and thought-provoking than the details about Thylacoleo.

• Mammals in Tasmania
• Marsupial Gallery
• The Tasmanian devil is now confined to Tasmania.
• The Tasmanian Wolf/tiger
  • The Tasmanian wolf is probably extinct
  • Proposal to clone a Tasmanian tiger (by Michael Archer).
  • Proposal to clone it from preserved museum specimens. Lee Dye column for ABC News.

• Sugar gliders
• The marsupial mole: Dennis, C. 2004. A mole in hand... Nature 432, 142-143. Not freely available on the Web unless you or your institution subscribe.
• Michael Archer musing about small marsupials. Interview with New Scientist: highly recommended! New Scientist foolishly took it off its Web site: you can see from this summary how great an article it was!

New Zealand

• A 1250-year-old New Zealand Kauri tree
• Wildlife of New Zealand. Huge set of links.

• Moas
  • There were only two species of large moas in New Zealand, and the females were much larger than the males. National Geographic News, September 11, 2003, based on two new papers in Nature: v. 425, 172-175 and 175-178. Quite a number of bird species have larger females (raptors are nearly always biased that way if there is a difference at all). It's sometimes related to the fact that females can lay more eggs at larger body size. But the difference in moas is larger than anything among living birds (females can be more than twice the weight of males). How do we know? The Maori killed off the moas so recently that we can get enough DNA from the bones to make the tests.
  • Moa pages and pages by Mike Dickson

• Haast's eagle BBC News OnLine, January 2005. This news report concentrates largely on the way this giant eagle killed moas. The more exciting part of the research concerns its rapid evolution from an ancestor that was probably like the Little Eagle of Australia. If so, and if the dates are correct, the eagle was the end-product of one of the fastest evolutionary size increases ever found in vertebrates. The paper is Bunce, M., et al. 2005. Ancient DNA provides new insights into the evolutionary history of New Zealand's extinct giant eagle. PLoS Biol 3(1): e9. It's freely available on the Web (RC: add URL!).

• Kiwis
  • Kiwis are in serious danger of extinction: BBC September 1999.
  • Kiwis
  • Kiwi conservation
  • Kiwi on New Zealand stamps

• Wetas

• Tuataras

• The Kakapo
  • The Kakapo.
  • Good news about the kakapo. BBC News OnLine, March 20, 2002. This is the only nocturnal flightless parrot in the world, in New Zealand.
  • Kakapo recovery program

South America

• Charles Darwin wrote with amazement about the fossils of the extinct South American mammals in Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter 5, and also in Chapter 8, especially toward the end of the chapter.
• How and when did rodents reach South America? Press release, October 31, 2001.
• The largest rodent that ever lived (from the Miocene of Venezuela). The paper is in Science, September 18, 2003. BBC News OnLine
• Sloths now live in trees, eating leaves and moving with painful slowness. But remains of huge ground sloths have been found in South America, including one that must have been almost as large as an elephant. Two Uruguayan paleontologists suggest that this largest ground sloth, Megatherium, was a carnivore, the largest mammalian carnivore that ever evolved: the "killer sloth. (I find it difficult to believe.)
• However, this is far better documented: sea sloths. Blog by Carl Zimmer, June 2004.
• And here is a new look at glypodont biology. From Nature news service, May 1999.
• The phorusrhacids of South America, by Carl Zimmer for Discover. 1997

Africa

• List of the members of the Afrotheria with many Web links.
• Short formal commentary on Afrotheria by Blair Hedges in PNAS.
• An early African expedition uncovers an Arsinoitherium
• Africa shortly before it collided with Eurasia. National Geographic News, December 3, 2003. Unexpected finds: arsinoitheres survived longer than we thought in the island continent of Africarabia; elephants were radiating even before they migrated into Eurasia.

Islands and Biogeography

• The geese on Hawaii. A sub-fossil example: The mini-radiation of geese on prehistoric Hawaii. National Geographic News, February 6, 2002. What's more, they were all descended from the Canada goose, within the last half-million years.
• Giant Pleistocene Birds on Cuba The gigantic Cuban owl Ornimegalonyx
• The Dodo: a pigeon from an Asian lineage. Paper from February 2002: National Geographic News We have known for a long time that it was a pigeon: the question was where it had come from.

The reference list for Chapter 18, 4th Edition, with associated Web links

Last updated December 4, 2006.

All links checked October 5, 2005.

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[For Chapter 19, click here ]

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