Twig specialists from Cuba and Puerto Rico, via Luke Mahler, UC Davis. Tree trunk-near-ground specialists from Hispaniola and Jamaica by B. Falk.
It’s a classic time traveling dilemma: you have to be careful not step on any plants or slap any mosquitoes, otherwise you’ll disrupt evolution and when you get back to the present, horses will be in charge and you won’t be able to walk anywhere.But a new study that came out in Science looks at the convergent evolution of 100 species of lizards that were divided across islands in the Caribbean for 40 million years and “found similar-looking lizards occupying similar environmental niches.”
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According to Luke Mahler, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Davis and the first author on the paper, “With few exceptions, each species on an island has a match on the other islands.”Spread across Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, they tend to fall into three groups: short-legged camouflaged lizards have evolved to living on twigs, green species with big toe pads have taken up in the canopy, and some have evolved to live by the trunks. “Species diversifying in similar environments produce similar, evolutionary results,” Jonathan Losos, who worked on the study, wrote in National Geographic.Similar studies have looked at species of fish in long-separated lakes in Africa, and over generations of bacteria grown and re-grown in the laboratory, which found that evolution happened the same way over and over way down on a molecular level.The researchers have used the phrase “evolution is deterministic,” a debate that sometimes can feel like the scientific heir to the religious question of free will vs. God’s plan. Whether or not there’s something “determined” in evolution is sort of a failure of language. Species evolve to fill niches in the environment. The environments across the Greater Antillean islands were similar enough—in terms of plants, predators and available food—that the lizard population reflected this similarity.Of course there are species that popped up without parallel. This is either because the islands do have environmental differences, or because God placed them there to reward the faithful.So if you find your way back in prehistory, go ahead and stomp around as much as you please! Eat a T-Rex if you can! It’s your big chance!But if you only go back a little ways, don't interrupt your parents meeting.
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