When I was much younger (as in when I was in elementary school) I used to pride myself with the knowledge that the tuatara, a reptile endemic to New Zealand, was not actually a lizard but was it’s own seperate branch of reptile that went back to the time of the dinosaurs. Like the Coelacanth the tuatara is considered a “living fossil.” This strange reptiles live very slow lives. They don’t move much, the metabolize food at a snails pace, they usually don’t mate until they are around fifteen years of age or so, and they are know to be able to live to upwards of a hundred years. I think that the tuatara is utterly fascinating. This article appearing today in Discovery News talks about how research is showing that this otherwise sluggish species actually has fast paced DNA evolution possibly making the tuatara the fastest evolving vertebrate animal even though in general it appears to have changed little over many million year. Very very cool. I love tuataras, I wish I had one as a pet.
(from Discovery News)
