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?

Are Phoridae found on all continents? Where are they not found? Is that because of poor sampling or is there actually any place in the world where phorids do not exist? And why is that?

Has there been any work done on biogeography in Phoridae? How many species of phorids have a wide range of distribution? 

Well, of course there are many more questions to be answered but I think it will be useful for to use this blog in order to remember some of them.

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Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith