[Laboratory XII - Walk on the Wild Side: The U.C. Botanical Garden]

Questions for Further Thought

  1. The plants growing together in the Miocene garden obviously can live together. Our look at the fossil record even suggests that they lived together in the past. Develop two different hypotheses explaining why these species do not occur together in nature? How would you test them?
  2. Botanists have observed many examples of plant species pairs in which one species is endemic to California and a very similar-looking species is found in Chile. To explain these patterns, researchers have devised elaborate schemes of long-distance dispersal and vicariance. Many of these explanations seem a little unsatisfying. What hypothesis must we test first before we worry about biogeography?



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