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
2 - Australia’s Acacia: unrecognised convergent evolution
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
This chapter takes a slightly different, long-term, view of continental collisions and invasions. Here we investigate Acacia s.l. from the Eocene to the Miocene to understand how it invaded the evolving landscapes of the Americas, Africa and Australia. This history highlights the convergent evolution within the paraphyletic genus as species invaded and dominated new arid landscapes that expanded at this time. Different lineages of Acacia s. l. evolved remarkably similar suites of adaptations in response to the increasing aridity, obscuring the independent evolutionary origins of ecological traits which we are only now discovering.
The taxonomic history of Acacia s.l. has been and still is a complex topic. Taxonomists defined Acacia s.l. over centuries of plant discovery as botanists explored the world. This ad hoc compilation of species into a genus resulted in the amalgamation of species that have converged within a similar type of habitat but the main morphological characters that define Acacia s. l. are symplesiomorphies, not synapomorphies of a unique lineage. It is now accepted that the genus, in its broad sense, is not monophyletic and thus it has been split into three large genera and two small genera.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Invasion Biology and Ecological TheoryInsights from a Continent in Transformation, pp. 23 - 38Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
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