No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2017
This article is a summary of the main points about the evolution of corals put forward in Veron (1995). The main points presented are first, a family tree of the Scleractinia; second, an analysis of genera and their present-day global distributions, age patterns and diversity, including the Cenozoic fossil record; third, coral species and their global distributions, species determination in fossils of Pliocene to Recent age, their geologic history and geographic characteristics; fourth, the theoretical aspects of coral evolution based on surface circulation vicariance, reticulate evolution, and the nature and origin of species. For non-biologists, important concepts and terms are noted in bold and are defined in a glossary at the end of the text.