ABSTRACT
Palaeontologists have long appreciated the importance of placing fossils and fossil lineages in their proper geological and palaeoenvironmental context, and as a consequence the disciplines of palaeontology and historical geology have developed in tandem. In contrast, a signi‘cant proportion of systematic biologists have historically concentrated on determining the evolutionary relationships amongst living forms without consideration of the changing landscape in which their ancestral lineages evolved. In addition, a longstanding dogma, particularly amongst vertebrate zoologists, was that extant species had evolved during the Pleistocene (e.g., Orr, 1960; Savage, 1960; Findley, 1969; Hubbard, 1974; Morafka, 1974; Schmidly et al., 1993). If an attempt was made to consider the biogeographic history of extant forms and their ancestral lineages, it was usually expressed as an ad hoc addendum to a systematic study, and it was set in a geologically static landscape across which ™ora and fauna were pushed by the climatic cycles of the Pleistocene glaciations.
