Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Testing hypotheses about biological invasions and Charles Darwin’s two-creators rumination
- Part I Ancient invaders
- 2 Australia’s Acacia: unrecognised convergent evolution
- 3 The mixed success of Mimosoideae clades invading into Australia
- 4 Perspectives from parrots on biological invasions
- 5 Invasion ecology of honeyeaters
- 6 The invasion of terrestrial fauna into marine habitat: birds in mangroves
- 7 The biological invasion of Sirenia into Australasia
- 8 Flying foxes and drifting continents
- 9 Invasion ecology of Australasian marsupials
- 10 Murine rodents: late but highly successful invaders
- 11 Drift of a continent: broken connections
- 12 The development of a climate: an arid continent with wet fringes
- Part II Modern invaders
- Index
- References
8 - Flying foxes and drifting continents
from Part I - Ancient invaders
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Foreword
- 1 Testing hypotheses about biological invasions and Charles Darwin’s two-creators rumination
- Part I Ancient invaders
- 2 Australia’s Acacia: unrecognised convergent evolution
- 3 The mixed success of Mimosoideae clades invading into Australia
- 4 Perspectives from parrots on biological invasions
- 5 Invasion ecology of honeyeaters
- 6 The invasion of terrestrial fauna into marine habitat: birds in mangroves
- 7 The biological invasion of Sirenia into Australasia
- 8 Flying foxes and drifting continents
- 9 Invasion ecology of Australasian marsupials
- 10 Murine rodents: late but highly successful invaders
- 11 Drift of a continent: broken connections
- 12 The development of a climate: an arid continent with wet fringes
- Part II Modern invaders
- Index
- References
Summary
Introduction
At some point, possibly as much as 55 Ma, but perhaps only as recently as sometime in the last few million years, the first pteropodid bat flew in from the north and crossed the coast of the Australian continent. This animal was arriving on a continent that was very different to the Australia we are familiar with today. Depending on exactly when it arrived, the continent was almost definitely a wetter, more forested place than it is today (see Chapter 12). If it arrived early, then both the flora and the fauna were still only beginning to evolve into the suite of species that we are familiar with and that flying fox may have been among the earliest of the eutherian mammals on the continent. If it arrived later, then it would have joined a diverse group of rats and other bats already present in the continent’s rich monotreme, metatherian and eutherian mammal communities. Irrespective of when exactly they arrived, the first individuals were arriving on a continent with a biota very different to that which they would have previously encountered.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Invasion Biology and Ecological TheoryInsights from a Continent in Transformation, pp. 138 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
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