SANTINI, F.: Historical Biogeography of Coral Reefs Organisms: is the Indonesian Region a Center of Origin?

Historical biogeography is the discipline concerned with the study of the evolutionary phenomena responsible for the distribution of living organisms in space. I have collected and analyzed phylogenetic hypotheses and distributional data for twelve clades of Indo-Western Pacific coral reef organisms, comprising fishes, mollusks and scleractinian corals. The analysis indicates that the Indonesian region, long thought to be a Acenter of origin@ for most of the Indo-Western Pacific marine fauna, seems to be a very derived area, and that most of the lineages may have had their origins in the Eastern Indian Ocean or in the South-Western Pacific.