New Scientist
Image: SidPix
A lumbering reptile has stolen a march on us all. A study shows that New Zealand’s tuatara is the fastest-evolving animal known.
The tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, is a “living fossil”, virtually unchanged since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, says David Lambert at the Allan Wilson Centre, Massey University. The tuatara takes 15 years to reach sexual maturity, reproduces only once every two to five years and has a slow metabolism.
However, when Lambert’s team analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 650 to 8000-year-old tuatara remains and compared them with those of living tuatara, they found that the reptile is evolving almost 10 times as fast as the average animal. It is accumulating an average of 1.37 substitutions per base pair every million years compared with an average of 0.2 (Trends in Genetics,DOI: 10.1016/j.tig.2007.12.002). Read more on newscientist.com…
