A PhD thesis in biogeography
Ullasa Kondandaramaiah defended his thesis "The dispersal-vicariance pendulum and butterfly biogeography" today. While this is not really a subject that I am studying, it still raised a lot of questions that I would love to be able to find answers to, here are some of them:
How many fossils of phorids are there laying around somewhere? How many different species have been described from amber fossils? How closely related are they to some extant species? How old are the oldest fossils?