What does geographic distribution have to do with Evolution?

According to Leon Croizat it has everything to do with it. He summed up his view that
the Earth and Life evolve together and that Life is just another layer of the Earth.
Can his idea of panbiogeography become a discipline like astronomy did from
astrology? Can we begin to see past phylogenetic transitions in the spatial variation of
geography's collection localities recorded today? Will we be able, by an analysis of
geographic distributions create a biogeographic synthesis that is able to dissect the mass
of data available into a panbiogeography capable of integrating local differences and
global trends? Most of the critics of panbiogeography say no but no one has really
tried.
-------------- take the case of Dermatemys the Central American River Turtle-------------One might get the idea that Dermatemys' ancestors and/or Dermatemys itself may have
been fairly widespread, spread at least throughout the Northern Hemisphere but more
likely to be found in and around the area it presently occurs in (the region where the
Yucatan Peninsula connects with the Mexican Mainland).

Fossils with affinity to Dermatemys posses a broad geographic distribution. These

fossils werefirst found in geological layers during a time when the Yucatan was
beginning to separate.

Back in the Triassic there was a line of land connections that linked the areas of these
fossils

By the time the fossils appeared this possible ancestral area may had been divided
physically and possibly phylogenetically and many of the resultant lineages had possibly
gone extinct or changed into other turtles. Since this phyla is so different than other
turtles it seems more likely that the relatives of the present day river turtle simply went
extinct.
240 million years ago however is as old as the turtles may have been themselves.

By 200 they may have split along with some other larger divisions that resulted in
different forms that would eventually outcompete with them except in the Yucatan which
by 170 began to become isolated

until 16 mya when it reunited with an ancient turtle still on the land.
and were last seen about the time the Yucatan was reconnecting with the mainland.

During the course or most of modern turtle speciation

Dermatemys remained unchanged without as much pressure to
change and survied as the Yucatan collieded.

Now there are two scenarios for the collosion. Can the modern
details of the geogrphic distribution indicate this as well?

Well that would be the goal of panbiogeography to have a way

to understand past events using current distributions and
inference on fossil evidence. Is this just a hopeful story or could
it be understood to be a truth?