"This wonderful relationship between in the same continent between the dead and the living, will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts!" Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Darwin in remarking on the fact that South America (and other places) have fossils that are similar, in the basic aspects, to organisms today. I suspect he suspected they are united through ancestor-descendant relationships. That is phenotypes evolve. But this is not to say, necessarily, you get new species.
Something I always thought about but it's really semantics: how do you define a new species if it isn't splitting into two species. Which one is the original - or does it even exist? Better to think of these things as lineages rather than species.
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Rob Jackson from Duke came by to give a talk on the environmental effects of natural gas drilling. Great talk. The upshot: it's messy. Some evidence that as some places there's some effect.
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