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The monkey's voyage : how improbable journeys shaped the history of life / Alan de Queiroz.

by De Queiroz, Alan.

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Basic Books, c2014.

Animals -- Dispersal.

Plants -- Dispersal.

9780465020515 (hc.)

0465020518 (hc.)

Alternate title:

How improbable journeys shaped the history of life

vii, 360 pages : illustrations, charts, maps ; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 311-349) and index.

Of garter snakes and Gondwana -- Earth and life -- From Noah's Ark to New York : the roots of the story -- The fragmented world -- Over the edge of reason -- New Zealand stirrings -- Trees and time -- The DNA explosion -- Believe the forest -- The improbable, the rare, the mysterious, and the miraculous -- The green web -- A frog's tale -- The monkey's voyage -- The long, strange history of the Gondwanan Islands -- Transformations -- The structure of biogeographic "revolutions" -- A world shaped by miracles -- Epilogue : the driftwood coast.

"Throughout the world, closely related species are found on landmasses separated by wide stretches of ocean. Why are such species found where they are across the Earth? Since the discovery of plate tectonics, scientists have conjectured that plants and animals were scattered over the globe by riding pieces of ancient supercontinents as they broke up. In the past decade, however, that theory has foundered, as the genomic revolution has made reams of new data available. And the data has revealed an extraordinary, stranger-than-fiction story that has sparked a scientific upheaval. In The Monkey’s Voyage, biologist Alan de Queiroz describes the radical new view of how fragmented distributions came into being: frogs and mammals rode on rafts and icebergs, tiny spiders drifted on storm winds, and plant seeds were carried in the plumage of sea-going birds to create the map of life we see today. In other words, these organisms were not simply constrained by continental fate; they were the makers of their own geographic destiny. And as de Queiroz shows, the effects of oceanic dispersal have been crucial in generating the diversity of life on Earth, from monkeys and guinea pigs in South America to beech trees and kiwi birds in New Zealand. By toppling the idea that the slow process of continental drift is the main force behind the odd distributions of organisms, this theory highlights the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the history of life"--Provided by publisher.

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