(*) Summary. Charles Darwin provided scientific content to the concept of the evolution. He mainly focused his attention on the environment that controls the evolution of organisms and the appearance of new species.

The environment can be considered to be the result of the interaction of chemio-physical biotic and abiotic factors, such as temperature, light, rainfall, type of substrate, oxygenation, and in some cases ice cover also. Moreover, the environment is closely linked to climatic oscillations.

What might have excited Darwin's curiosity in Antarctica? This continent is an icy alien world representing an extreme and harsh environment characterised by very low temperatures, long periods without light, violent windsand cold water at low temperature.

The historical development of the evolution concept highlights a series of laws, of which we can highlight the adaptation to the environment, adaptive convergence, parallel evolution, time of evolution, Haeckel rule, irreversibility of mutations and tectonics control.

Besides, organisms adapted to cold envirnments produce specific adaptations able to tolerate these extremely low temperatures, responding to many factors such as increased reserve of fat, feather isolation and slowing of life functions. Moreover, they can show typical behaviour including very specific parental cares (i.e. emperor penguins).

Antarctic penguins and seals have modified their limbs for fast swimming (paddling). This is an example of environmental adaptation and adaptive convergence. Actually, penguins and seals adopt similar paddling limbs to swim, like other taxa (for instance, whales, dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs).

Moreover, adaptive convergence may gradually tend to parallel evolution. Antarctic biota presents some examples of this law. Some insects and fishes produce antifreezing substances to maintain their blood fluid, similar to other organisms in other cold areas of the planet.

Darwin did not know that palaeogeography changed through geological time. Godwana was a supercontinent including South America, Africa, Antarctica and Australia. These continents separated during geologic time: South America and Antarctica were joined up during the Eocene; Australia separated from Antarctica during the lower Tertiary (60 million years ago). Analysing the fossil record, Darwin might observe that evolution has reached the level of placental mammals during the Eocene, in both South America and Antarctica; evolution has even reached the level of marsupials in Australia. Actually, Australia separated from Antarctica when mammals were exclusively represented by primitive non-placental taxa.

In this manner Darwin might observe that typical specialisations are favoured by the geographic isolation that produces endemisms. The Antarctic continent hosts numerous animals, including emperor penguins, Weddel seals and ice fishes. Endemisms are usually synonymous with very specialised organisms. Modifying the environmental conditions, the question is: "Are they able to survive adapting to the new conditions?".

Specialisation is usually negative when the environmental conditions are changing. Thus, specialised or hyper-specialised species tend to disappear. If climate will change, several species could disappear. This occurred several times during the geological history of the Earth, also marking dramatic events (mass extinctions).

From the point of view of our own species, modern technologies and other advantages could arise from these examples of adaptive strategies. Medical sciences indeed focus their attention on the substances that allow fluid blood under very cold temperatures. Adaptive convergence may sugest solutions to architectural challenges. For example, the structure of the ostracod carapace is very similar to the Brunelleschi's dome in Florence, or the Greek house. Could the environmental adaptation that Darwin envisaged as basic for his theory, become also a useful tool for human evolution?
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(**) Biodata: Professor Nevio Pugliese is Full professor on Paleontology at the University of Trieste since November 2000 and is the Director of the Antarctic Museum, Trieste. He has been a Guest professor in the University of Vienna, where he held courses in 1999 on systematics and ecology on Cenozoic and Pleistocene ostracods.

His research expertise includes:

Systematics and ecology of marine, brackish and fresh-water micro-faunas (mainly ostracods) in the Mediterranean area and Indo-Pacific regions (Red Sea, Thailand Gulf), applying the results in Plio-Quaternary investigations;

A second area of his research is applications of the paleontology in the geoarchaeological research; and systematics, ecology, palaeoecology and biostratigraphy of microfaunas (mainly ostracods) in Antarctic and periantarctic areas;

Finally, he is also concerned with our own region regarding systematics, ecology, palaeoecology, biostratigraphy and palaeogeography in the time-span Cretaceous-Eocene in our own Karst region. He is the author of more than 130 publications.

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