Biogeography Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓The word biogeography was first used in a major scientific context by German naturalist August Wilhelm Grisebach in 1872 in his study of global plant distribution.
• ✓Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-discovered natural selection alongside Charles Darwin in 1858, is considered the father of biogeography and divided the globe into six major zoogeographic regions still used by scientists today.
• ✓Biogeographers discovered that Madagascar, which split from mainland Africa around 88 million years ago, evolved an almost entirely unique set of animals found nowhere else on Earth, including over 100 species of lemurs.
• ✓Using biogeography, scientists figured out that the titanosaur dinosaur Gondwanatitan, found in Brazil, was closely related to dinosaurs found in Africa because both continents were connected until about 100 million years ago.
• ✓Modern biogeography uses satellite data, fossil GPS coordinates, and machine learning algorithms to predict where undiscovered dinosaur fossils might be buried based on ancient continental positions.