“…They have been widely used to study area relationships (Cracraft & Prum, 1988;Bates et al, 1998;Marks et al, 2002;Eberhard & Bermingham, 2005), to test evolutionary and historical hypotheses (Aleixo, 2004;Ribas et al, 2005;Aleixo & Rossetti, 2007) and even to suggest conservation priorities (Conservation International, 2003;da Silva et al, 2005;Young et al, 2009). At present, up to nine Amazonian areas of endemism are recognized for birds (Cracraft, 1985;da Silva et al, 2002;Borges, 2007), and the generality of these areas has been supported by studies of plants (Prance, 1982), butterflies (Brown, 1982), frogs (Ron, 2000), lizards (Á vila-Pires, 1995) and primates (da Silva & Oren, 1996).…”