EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS FOREST INFLUENCE ANALYSED

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27912, 8 March 1956, Page 18

EVOLUTION OF ANIMALS

FOREST INFLUENCE ANALYSED

DR. R. R. FORSTER SPEAKS TO ROYAL SOCIETY Dr. R. R. Forster delivered his presi dential address to the Canterbury branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand last evening. Dr. Forster t zoologist at the Canterbury Museum has made a special study of forest fauna in New Zealand, and he spoke on the influence of forests on the evolution of animals. “I would suggest that the appearance of the tremendous forests of the late Palaeozoic age and the warm and equable climate of that time provided the optimum conditions necessary for the rise of land fauna." said Dr. Forster. "Without the protection of the buffered environment of these forests, there might have been no life on land or at least the terrestial forms would have taken much longer to develou their ability to withstand the harsh conditions to which they must have been exposed. "It seems likely that the earliest forest invertebrates did not actually provide the direct stock from which the more hardy and successful forms —the flying insects—evolved," Dr Forster said. “From the close of the Palaeozoic age to the present day the forests have perhaps tended to fill a second ary role in the evolution of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate They have provided a sheltered home dur mg the early development of the varied groups of animals which at their particular stage of evolutionary development would have been unable to withstand the competition of the contemporaneous animals occupying the open country. ... * “The world-wide distribution of animals, which it is difficult to imagine successfully crossing wide stretches of water, itself suggests a distribution achieved over a vast period of time during which changes of land distribution permitted the gradual spread to the continents and islands we know today," Dr. Forster said. “New Zealand, because of its isolation in the midst of a wide stretch of sea. which has not permitted the more recently evolved and more vizorous invertebrates to obtain a strong foothold, has retained a higher eoncentration than any other part of the world of primitive animals whose drnect Imeage extends back much further than the better-known kiwis and tuatara. "These small animals, living in the main in the leaf mould and moss of the forests, have therefore been little affected by the tides of life which have swept around them.” Dr. Forster said. "They represent to the biologist a fascinating chapter of evolutionary history surviving from the past"