The Great American Biotic Interchange

Two rather different elements combine to explain the origin of this volume: one scientific and one personal. The broader of the two is the scientific basis—the time for such a volume had arrived. Geology had made remarkable progress toward an understanding of the phys­ ical history of the Caribbean Basin for the last 100 million years or so. On the biological side, many new discoveries had elucidated the distributional history of terrestrial orga­ nisms in and between the two Americas. Geol...