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Scientists have discovered that snakes have a powerful evolutionary clock that allows them to adapt at a much faster rate than other reptiles. This ability helped them become evolutionary “winners” and spread across the planet.
”snake It is like a Big Bang “singularity” in cosmology, a dramatic expansion in the diversity of species and their ecology, and is related to some event that may have occurred early in the snake’s evolutionary history. ” said the lead author. Pascal’s titlesaid the evolutionary macroecologist at Stony Brook University in New York in a statement.
The new study was published Thursday (February 22) in the journal scienceThe researchers investigated what makes animal populations evolutionary winners, and in particular why certain populations seem to diversify into more species and be better at surviving events like mass extinctions. . daniel laboskyan evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan whose research focuses on macroevolution, told Live Science via email.
Scientists studied more than 11,000 species of reptiles, the order Squamatora, including snakes and lizards. Within this group, snakes in particular are extremely diverse, with approximately 4,000 known snake species, ranging from venomous snakes to snakes. sea snake, giant constrictor and with hood cobra Even tiny thread snakes that dig holes and eat ants and termites.
Related: The world’s largest snake (and 9 other giant snakes)
To find out why snakes are such an evolutionary success story, researchers conducted a large-scale study of the genomes of about 1,000 snakes and lizards. They also examined the stomach contents of more than 60,000 museum specimens and field observations to determine dietary preferences. Using this data, the researchers constructed a comprehensive evolutionary tree of changes in the group’s body and diet over time. They then used mathematical and statistical models to examine how snakes and lizards evolved.
Their findings suggest that snakes have undergone several evolutionary bursts and have evolved three times faster than lizards in terms of diversity. After probably first appearing about 128 million years ago, a massive explosion occurred at some point between then and 70 million years ago. Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago), then another large pulse occurred. dinosaurs went extinct Around the end of the Cretaceous period.
As the team’s model shows, this rapid evolution continues to this day.
“Compared to lizards, lizards change relatively rapidly and continue to change over time,” Labovsky said. “Thus, the continued ‘evolutionary explosion’ of snakes continues today, in part due to the fact that the rate of evolution, the snake’s ‘evolutionary clock’ so to speak, is ticking much faster than that of many other snakes. “This fast-ticking evolutionary clock is critical because it allows snakes to quickly evolve new traits and take advantage of opportunities as they arise.”
Snakes’ evolutionary flexibility allows them to change their body shape and diet “very quickly,” he said. The first “singularities” that led to snake success appear to have started when snakes developed limbless bodies, flexible skulls, and sophisticated chemical detection systems.
These changes allowed them to target vast numbers of prey and provided a framework for individual species to develop and specialize.previous Research published in 2021 After the dinosaurs went extinct, the diversity of their diets exploded, and snakes rapidly developed new adaptations to take advantage of the new world they found themselves in, a world without dinosaurs where mammals were beginning to establish a foothold. It shows that it has evolved into
However, it remains a mystery why snakes came to have fast evolutionary clocks in the first place. “This is a big issue for us,” Labosky said. “We still can’t fully explain this… but that’s the nature of science, right? Solving a mystery usually goes hand in hand with raising new questions that have to be answered.”
And snakes probably continue to adapt and evolve super rapidly. “This is obviously speculation, but there is no sign that the rapid evolution of snakes is slowing down,” Labovski said. “Snakes seem to continue to evolve new lifestyles, and I have high hopes that this will continue into the future.”
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