Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth
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| Author | Dennis McCarthy |
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| Published | 2009 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Pages | xxiii + 214 |
| ISBN | 9780199542468 |
Here Be Dragons: How the Study of Animal and Plant Distributions Revolutionized Our Views of Life and Earth is a 2009 book by Dennis McCarthy, published by Oxford University Press. It is a popular history of biogeography — the study of where animals and plants live, and why — and of how that field came to underpin two of the largest ideas in modern science.
The book's argument is that biogeography is not a minor branch of natural history but the discipline in which evolution and plate tectonics were each independently confirmed, and the place where biology, geology, oceanography and climatology meet. The distributions of organisms across continents and oceans, McCarthy shows, repeatedly turned out to record the movements of the Earth itself.
Content
McCarthy traces the subject from the puzzles that first provoked it — why the same or closely related species appear on landmasses now separated by oceans — through Darwin and Wallace, to the acceptance of continental drift in the twentieth century. Along the way he uses individual cases of distribution in space and time to show how the geography of life constrains what any theory of the Earth's history is allowed to say.
The title refers to the legend inscribed on the blank regions of early maps, and the book takes the filling-in of those blanks as its organizing image.
Significance for expansion tectonics
The book is written for a general audience and presents the mainstream account, but its subject matter is the same evidence on which McCarthy's more contested geological work rests. His technical papers argue that trans-Pacific biotic links — related organisms on opposite sides of the ocean — require a substantially smaller Mesozoic Pacific than plate-tectonic reconstructions permit, and that the simplest reading of the distributional data is that the basin, and the Earth with it, has grown.
Here Be Dragons is therefore the accessible statement of the evidence base behind that argument, and the reason McCarthy's biogeographical case is taken seriously within the expansion tectonics literature catalogued on this wiki. See Dennis J McCarthy for his geophysical papers and the ether-sink conception of gravity he associates with planetary growth.
Reception
The book was well received as a popularization. Reviewers described it as an engaging and at times witty account of one of the fastest-growing biological disciplines, and credited McCarthy with showing persuasively that biogeography links the earth and life sciences rather than sitting between them. It was reviewed in BioScience and Science News among others; a common criticism was that its breadth comes at the cost of depth on any single episode.