A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange
Z. Jack Tseng · Leah X. Kahn · Adolfo Pacheco-Castro · Oscar Carranza-Castañeda · José Jorge Aranda-Gomez · Yang Wang · Julio César Chávez-Ambriz · Chance Hannold · H. Gregory McDonald · Xiaoming Wang
期刊Science
类型Article
发表2026-07-30
卷期页393(6810): 532-536
收录2026-10-09
被浏览…
关键词Great American Biotic Interchangemammal dispersalbiotic homogenization
标签—
The movement of taxa between North and South America across the Panamanian land bridge, known as the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI), established modern-day mammal assemblages in the Americas, heralding the decisive end of what has been called the “splendid isolation” of the South American fauna. Lacking substantive low-latitude records, previous work on this pattern relied on South American and temperate North American fossils to conclude that pulsed interchanges began about 2.8 million years ago (mya). Based on new low-latitude fossil data from México, we found evidence for a prolonged, triphasic interchange. Phase 1 consisted of the initial accumulation of northern higher-latitude mammals in a Mexican “holding pen” beginning 10 mya. Dispersal began in phase 2, with a strong north-south gradient and increasing biogeographic connections (7 to 3 mya). The final phase consisted of the already well-described taxonomic pulses (from ~2.8 mya).

@article{tseng2026,
author = {Z. Jack Tseng and Leah X. Kahn and Adolfo Pacheco-Castro and Oscar Carranza-Castañeda and José Jorge Aranda-Gomez and Yang Wang and Julio César Chávez-Ambriz and Chance Hannold and H. Gregory McDonald and Xiaoming Wang},
title = {A 10-million-year biogeographic holding pen primed the Great American Biotic Interchange},
journal = {Science},
year = {2026},
volume = {393},
number = {6810},
pages = {532-536},
doi = {10.1126/science.aef2893},
publisher = {American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)},
}· END ·