Who are the evolutionary losers?
Crocodiles and alligators are nearly 250 million years old yet have diversified into only 23 species, Alfaro said. They are diversifying a staggering 1,000 times slower than would have been expected. “Their species richness is so low, given how old they are,” he said. The tuatara, which lives in New Zealand and resembles lizards — although it is actually a distant cousin — has only two species. “In the same period of time that produced more than 8,000 species of snakes and lizards, there were only two species of tuatara,” Alfaro said. Why are there not thousands of species of tuataras? “That is one of the big mysteries about biodiversity,” Alfaro said. “Why these evolutionary losers are still around is a very hard thing to explain. They have been drawing inside straights for hundreds of millions of years. It’s a real mystery to biologists how there can be any tuataras, given their low rate of speciation. They must have something working for them that has allowed them to persist. In spe
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