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Biology of Chrysomelidae pp 115–130Cite as

The Origins of the Alticinae

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Part of the book series: Series Entomologica ((SENT,volume 42))

Abstract

The Alticinae contain between eight and ten thousand described species placcd in some five hundred genera with a common phylogenetic origin, and a survey of this array can give rise to a number of different views. There is an African Alticinae fauna with many characteristic elements, even at the generic level, but there are also African genera known from North America. There are large numbers of species in the cosmopolitan genera Epitrix, Chaetocnema, and Longitarsus in Central America, and this number shows a striking decrease southwards through South America. Such matters raise the question: how has this happened? The distribution of the genera of the Alticinae reflects geological and ecological events in the earth’s history. The last twenty years have witnessed astonishing progress in the geo-sciences which, among other things, have corroborated the theory of continental drift proposed by Alfred Wegener (1912). Continental drift, supported by many other sciences, and an increase in knowledge of the Tertiary and Pleistocene also gives insight into the origin of the Alticinae. As Darlington (1957) has written: ‘If the geographical distribution of some animal taxon is to be used for testing a phylogenetic classification, the history of the surface of the earth must be correctly known.’ Conversely, however, this requires a well-studied group of animals, and the subfamily Alticinae is just such a group.

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‘Theory without fact is fantasy but fact without theory is chaos. Divorced, both are useless; united, they are equally essential and fruitful’

C O. Whitman (1894)

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  1. Zoologische Staatssammlung, D-8000, München 60, Federal Republic of Germany

    Gerhard Scherer

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  1. Gerhard Scherer
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P. Jolivet E. Petitpierre T. H. Hsiao

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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Scherer, G. (1988). The Origins of the Alticinae. In: Jolivet, P., Petitpierre, E., Hsiao, T.H. (eds) Biology of Chrysomelidae. Series Entomologica, vol 42. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3105-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3105-3_8

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