One of the areas of overlap between systematics and ecology that has so far proven intractable to our understanding is community organization: To what extent does history constrain the structure of ecological communities? Or, how important is ecology in filtering historical elements? To clarify the distinction between the historical and the contemporary ecological perspective, consider the two extremes: (a) ecology is unimportant but history important, versus (b) ecology is important and history unimportant. (Obviously, any given situation in the real world lies somewhere between these hypothetical end points). However, a particular example can always be viewed from either perspective. For example, consider the Australian marsupial fauna. Historical: the facts that marsupials were present, but placentals failed to reach Australia are accidental events that profoundly shaped the entire biota. Ecological: these marsupials radiated into numerous ecological niches (arboreal, terrestrial, herbivores, megaherbivores, insectivores, and carnivores), closely paralleling adaptive radiations of placentals elsewhere. Indeed, such convergent responses demonstrate that ecological factors direct evolutionary responses.
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Duellman et al. (1990) studied this question.