Distribution
Plains pocket gophers are found throughout the Great Plains of North America ranging from southern Manitoba (Canada), and eastern North Dakota south to New Mexico and Texas in the United States, and as far east as the extreme western parts of Indiana. Eight subspecies are currently recognised, although some former subspecies have since been considered to be species in their own right, and are no longer included:
- Geomys bursarius bursarius - Canada, the Dakotas, Minnesota
- Geomys bursarius illinoensis - Illinois
- Geomys bursarius industrius - southwestern Kansas
- Geomys bursarius major - Texas, Oklahoma, eastern New Mexico
- Geomys bursarius majusculus - Iowa, eastern Nebraska and Kansas, northern Missouri
- Geomys bursarius missouriensis - eastern Missouri
- Geomys bursarius ozarkensis - Arkansas
- Geomys bursarius wisconsinensis - western Wisconsin
Fossil remains have been found as far south as Tennessee, indicating a late Pleistocene, early Holocene population. This would support the hypothesis that drier environmental conditions with extensive prairies extended further south during the Late Wisconsinan glacial period, supporting populations of Geomys and other prairie species such as thirteen-lined ground squirrels and prairie chickens.
Read more about this topic: Plains Pocket Gopher
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)