Tuesday Pangea blogging

Sorry. I was actually incapable of coming up with a better title for a blog post. So we're stuck with "Tuesday Pangea blogging." Why? Mite harvestmen, that's why.

They provide (I suppose unnecessarily) yet more evidence that Pangea was, in fact, Pangea. What sets these craggy bugs apart--or rather, what's helpful about them to scientists--is the their unique inability to proliferate. Today, a couple-hundred-billion years or so down, there are thousands of different mite harvestmen species around the planet. But on a short time-scale and at a local level, they don't disperse very far. Which means that, in the long aftermath of Pangea's breakup, you can find the descendants of what was once a localized species of mite harvestmen living quasi-statically, like living fossils, in several far off corners of the globe.