Abstract
The ancestors of today’s terrestrial arthropods probably followed more than one route when they first conquered the land. Some may have ventured across sandy beaches or the rocky intertidal zone, others went through mangrove swamps or by way of fresh water streams and lakes to the moist humus and leaf litter of tropical rain forests. In contrast, the vertebrates are believed to have emigrated to land via oxygen-deficient tropical swamps. The study of extant Crustacea illustrates some of the ways in which ancestral arthropods may have become adapted to life on land, and it is possible to gain some idea of the course of evolution by correlating the adaptations of existing species with the various environments they inhabit.
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Further Reading
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cloudsley-Thompson, J.L. (1988). The Conquest of the Land by Crustacea. In: Evolution and Adaptation of Terrestrial Arthropods. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61360-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-61360-9_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-18188-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-61360-9
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