Mammals as a Key to Evolutionary Theory

摘要: Mammalogy provides exceptionally fertile grounds for advancing evolutionary theory, because its data spans from diverse researches on living forms to a rich fossil record. I illustrate this by integrating interdisciplinary evidence and hypotheses in the habitat including : 1) context of paleoclimatic changes, how species' distributions responded them; 2) geographical biases turnover rates species; 3) turnover-pulse hypothesis; 4) breadth resource use as cause phylogenetic rates. Preliminary tests using late Neogene records Americas Africa suggest that major aspects Great American Interchange have parallels African record, predicted theory