Biogeography: Wallace and Wegener (2 of 2)

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Plate Tectonics
The biogeographic regions of the world that Wallace recognized roughly coincide with the continents themselves. But in the twentieth century, scientists have recognized that biogeography has been far more dynamic over the course of life’s history. In 1915 the German geologist Alfred Wegener (left) was struck by the fact that identical fossil plants and animals had been discovered on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Since the ocean was too far for them to have traversed on their own, Wegener proposed that the continents had once been connected. Only in the 1960s, as scientists carefully mapped the ocean floor, were they able to demonstrate the mechanism that made continental drift possible—plate tectonics.

Wegener found that the distributions of fossils of several organisms supported his theory that the continents were once joined together.

Biogeographers now recognize that as continents collide, their species can mingle, and when the continents separate, they take their new species with them. Africa, South America, Australia, and New Zealand, for example, were all once joined into a supercontinent called Gondwanaland. The continents split off one by one, first Africa, then New Zealand, and then finally Australia and South America. The evolutionary tree of some groups of species—such as tiny insects known as midges—show the same pattern. South American and Australian midges, for example, are more closely related to one another than they are to New Zealand species, and the midges of all three land masses are more closely related to one another than they are to African species. In other words, an insect that may live only a few weeks can tell biogeographers about the wanderings of continents tens of millions of years ago.

The Earth's crust has been found to be composed of several distinct plates.

• Wegener image © Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany.
• Fossil distribution and crustal plates images courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.