Friday, December 24, 2010

The reptiles' answer to the Coelacanth

The reptiles' answer to the Coelacanth "Like the Coelacanth, Tuataras are the last surviving species of an order that thrived in ancient, ancient history and was once thought to be totally extinct—in this case, Sphenodontia.

The Tuatara looks a lot more like its fossilized relatives than the living Coelacanth does, but Tuatara isn't a species frozen in time. In fact, its genome seems to be accumulating mutations faster than any other living vertebrates'. It's just that most of the mutations are happening in places that don't change what the Tuatara looks like."

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