New YorkGatra.com- Snakes have an evolutionary clock that is ticking much faster than other animal groups, allowing them to diversify and evolve at superfast speeds, researchers have found. Thereby Live Science23/2.
Snakes have a super advanced evolutionary clock that allows them to adapt much faster than other reptiles, scientists have found. This ability has helped them become evolutionary “winners” and spread throughout the planet to colonize Earth.
“Snakes are like the Big Bang ‘singularity’ in cosmology—a dramatic expansion of species diversity and their ecology, linked to several events that probably occurred early in the evolutionary history of snakes,” said lead author Pascal Title, an evolutionary macroecologist at Stony Brook University in New York. , said in a statement.
In a new study, published Thursday (Feb. 22) in the journal Science researchers investigated what makes animal groups evolutionary winners – specifically, why certain groups were able to diversify into more species and perform better at surviving events such as mass extinctions – study author Daniel Rabosky, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan, whose research focuses on macroevolution, told Live Science via email.
The scientists looked at squamates, an order of reptiles that includes snakes and lizards and includes more than 11,000 species. Within this group, snakes, in particular, are extremely diverse — the roughly 4,000 known species of snakes range from venomous sea snakes, giant constrictors and hooded cobras to tiny thread snakes that dig holes to feed on ants and termites.
To find out why snakes are an evolutionary success story, researchers conducted a massive study of the genomes of nearly 1,000 snakes and lizards. They also examined food preferences by looking at the stomach contents of more than 60,000 museum specimens and field observations. With this data, they built a comprehensive evolutionary tree of body and diet changes in the group over time. They then used mathematical and statistical models to see how snakes and lizards evolved.
Their findings suggest that snakes experienced several evolutionary explosions and evolved three times faster than lizards, in terms of diversity. After most likely first appearing around 128 million years ago, there was a huge explosion between then and 70 million years ago, during the period Cretaceous (145 million to 66 million years ago), and another large wave after the dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period.
This rapid pace of evolution continues today, based on the team model. “Compared to lizards, they have changed relatively quickly, and they continue to change over time,” Rabosky said. “So we could also say that the ‘evolutionary boom’ of snakes is still going on today and seems to be partly driven by the fact that the rate of evolution – one could say their ‘evolutionary clock’ – is running much faster than that of many other snakes. animal group. “This fast-moving evolutionary clock is critical because it allows snakes to rapidly develop new traits that can take advantage of emerging opportunities.”
Snakes’ evolutionary flexibility allows them to change their body shape and diet “very quickly,” he said. The initial “singularity” that led to success in snakes appears to have started with the development of limbless bodies, flexible skulls, and sophisticated chemical detection systems.
These changes allowed them to target large numbers of prey, providing a framework for individual species to develop and specialize. Previous research published in 2021 showed that the diversity of their diets exploded after the dinosaurs went extinct, and snakes quickly developed new adaptations to make the most of the new world they found themselves in – a world without dinosaurs where mammals were starting to gain a foothold.
But why snakes have such a fast evolutionary clock is still a mystery. “This is a big question for us,” Rabosky said. “We can’t explain it yet… But this is the nature of science, isn’t it? Usually, solving a mystery goes hand in hand with raising new questions that you have to answer.”
And snakes will likely continue to adapt and evolve at a very rapid rate. “This is obviously just speculation, but we see no signs that snake evolution is slowing down,” Rabosky said. “Snakes seem to continue to develop new ways of living, and I hope this will continue in the future.”
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2024-02-23 21:39:27
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