The monkey's voyage : how improbable journeys shaped the history of life

Resource Information

The work The monkey's voyage : how improbable journeys shaped the history of life represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The monkey's voyage : how improbable journeys shaped the history of life

Title remainder

how improbable journeys shaped the history of life

Statement of responsibility

Alan de Queiroz

Creator

• De Queiroz, Alan

Subject

• Animals -- Dispersal
• Biogeografie
• Biogeography
• Biogeography
• Animals -- Dispersal
• Plants -- Dispersal
• Plants -- Dispersal
• Tiere
• Verbreitungsökologie
• Pflanzen

Language

eng

Summary

• An evolutionary biologist describes how diverse species of life--including monkeys, frogs and baobab trees--made long-distance trips across the ocean and made their homes around the world, opposing the long-held theory of continental drift. --Publisher's description
• "Throughout the world, closely related species are found on landmasses separated by wide stretches of ocean. What explains these far-flung distributions? 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."--

Assigning source

From publisher's description

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

570

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

LC call number

QH543.3

LC item number

.D42 2014

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography