Nabokovs butterfly biogeography is amazing (brightened my breakfast anyway). This from his 1945 paper: One can assume, I think, that there was a certain point in time when both Americas were entirely devoid of Plebejinae but were on the very eve of receiving an invasion of them from Asia where they had been already evolved. Going back still further, a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine with the purpose of exploring the Cenozoic era in a downward direction would reach a point --- presumably in the early Miocene --- where he still might find Asiatic butterflies classifiable on modern structural grounds as Lycenids, but would not be able to discover among them anything definitely referable to the structural group he now diagnoses as Plebejine. On his return journey, however, he would notice at some point a confuse adumbration, then a tentative fade-in of familiar shapes (among other, gradually vanishing ones) and at last would find Chilades-like and Aricia-like and Lycceides-like structures in the Palearctic region. Beautiful language and imagery. The whole paper is in the public domain at: hindawi/journals/psyche/1945/065236/abs/
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 07:44:20 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015