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Revision as of 15:32, 17 December 2024 by Surtsicna (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)The Greater Antilles Rise-Aves Ridge, commonly known as GAARlandia, is a hypothesized land bridge which is thought to have connected the Greater Antilles to South America around 33 million years ago (mya). Species are proposed to have colonized the Caribbean Islands through dispersal and vicariance, and the most prominent vicariance hypothesis involves colonization via GAARlandia. The hypothesis has been supported by studies of individual lineages, but simultaneous colonization by multiple lineages is yet to be proven.
The hypothesis was introduced by Ross MacPhee and Manuel Iturralde-Vinent in 1994. It states that the North American and South American plates compressed the Caribbean plate for 2 million years during the Eocene–Oligocene boundary, thereby uplifting the presently-submerged Aves Ridge in the eastern Caribbean Sea to connect South America with Puerto Rica via an unbroken land bridge; Puerto Rico is posited to have been further connected via dry land to Hispaniola, Cuba and eastern Jamaica
References
- Tong, Yanfeng; Binford, Greta; Rheims, Cristina A.; Kuntner, Matjaž; Liu, Jie; Agnarsson, Ingi (January 2019). "Huntsmen of the Caribbean: Multiple tests of the GAARlandia hypothesis". Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 130: 259–268. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2018.09.017.
- Ali, Jason R.; Hedges, S. Blair (17 August 2021). "Colonizing the Caribbean: New geological data and an updated land-vertebrate colonization record challenge the GAARlandia land-bridge hypothesis". Journal of Biogeography. 48 (11): 2699–2707. doi:10.1111/jbi.14234.