Rapidly Evolving Species More Likely to Go Extinct, Study Suggests
Published:21 Nov.2021 Source:University of Bristol
In a new study of lizards and their relatives, Dr Jorge Herrera-Flores of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences and colleagues have discovered that ‘slow and steady wins the race’. The team studied lizards, snakes and their relatives, a group called the Lepidosauria. Today there are more than 10,000 species of lepidosaurs, and much of their recent success is a result of fast evolution in favourable circumstances. But this was not always the case.
Mr Herrera-Flores explained: ‘Lepidosaurs originated 250 million years ago in the early Mesozoic Era, and they split into two major groups, the squamates on the one hand, leading to modern lizards and snakes, and the rhynchocephalians on the other, represented today by a single species, the tuatara of New Zealand. We expected to find slow evolution in rhynchocephalians, and fast evolution in squamates. But we found the opposite.’