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However, others have argued that much of Sulawesi’s flora and fauna originated more recently, and not through vicariance, but through over-water dispersal of species from Asia and Australia in the last 15m years.

They also may represent early inklings of the dispersal-vicariance debate: the stepping-stone and cargo ideas are obviously about long-distance dispersal, and the notion of Atlantis as a land bridge looks like a vicariance hypothesis, with the continuous ranges of animal “kinds” being split into Old and New World portions by the drowning of the lost continent.

Dr John Sparks, a co-author from the American Museum of Natural History explained: "The sister-group relationship between obligate cave fish from Madagascar and Australia is a remarkable example of Gondwanan vicariance - a split dating back to the Late Cretaceous."

For a family with five species, as illustrated, the probability that a lineage survives to the present in both regions, creating a coalescence point at the time of the vicariance event, is 0.14 for λ = 5 and 0.04 for λ = 10.

Because few shared lineages at the time of the vicariance event survive to the present, the coalescence point, traced by the green line, is pushed back earlier.