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Pink Iguana Species Discovered In The Galapagos
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Bianca
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Posts: 41646
Pink Iguana Species Discovered In The Galapagos
«
on:
January 05, 2009, 09:06:29 pm »
Pink Iguana Species Discovered in the Galapagos
National Geographic
January 5, 2009
—A new species of Galápagos iguana has scientists tickled pink.
The pink iguana, named after its salmon-colored skin, lives only on the Wolf volcano on the island of Isabela.
Charles Darwin did not visit the volcano on his travels to the Ecuadorian island chains in the 1830s, so the creature remained undiscovered until 1986, when it was spotted by park rangers. Only now has it been recognized as its own species.
Gabriele Gentile, of Rome's University Tor Vergata, and colleagues are the first team to research and document the iguana, which will receive a formal scientific name in an upcoming paper.
"What's surprising is that a new species of megafauna, like a large lizard, may still be [found] in a well-studied archipelago," Gentile told National Geographic News.
The team's genetic analyses, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the animal split off from other iguanas about five million years ago—the most ancient divergence of iguanas ever found.
The discovery ends an "evolutionary silence" of about nine million years, Gentile said.
That's because researchers didn't know what had happened between 10.5 million years ago, when land and marine iguanas split off, and a million years ago, when land iguanas apparently diverged into several species.
The pink iguana's future, however, isn't so rosy: Gentile and colleagues say the animal's population is "alarmingly small."
Feral cats introduced to the island may be eating the young reptiles, and goats may be competitors for food, Gentile said.
"We desperately need more funds to keep on doing our best to investigate and protect this newly recognized species," Gentile added, "before it becomes extinct."
—Christine Dell'Amore
Photograph by Gabriele Gentile
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Last Edit: January 05, 2009, 09:10:05 pm by Bianca
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Bianca
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Re: Pink Iguana Species Discovered In The Galapagos
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January 05, 2009, 09:23:03 pm »
Galapagos pink iguana identified
Italian biologists say reptile provides evolution clue
(ANSA)
- Rome,
January 5, 2009
- Italian biologists working on the Galapagos Islands have identified a pink-and-black striped iguana they claim Charles Darwin failed to spot during his visit to the volcanic archipelago in 1835.
Valerio Sbordoni and Gabriele Gentile of Rome's Tor Vergata University said that analysis of the iguana's mitochondrial DNA shows that the species is some five million years old, first appearing when many of the Galapagos islands were not yet even formed.
This would mean that the ''living fossil'' provides some of the earliest evidence of diversification on the archipelago, they said.
The researchers explained that comparisons with the DNA of other species placed the pink iguana at the base of the genealogical tree for terrestrial iguanas.
Further research was needed to reconstruct the evolutionary history of iguanas in light of the evidence, they added.
''But immediate efforts are required to safeguard this species we have identified and to prevent it from becoming extinct,'' they said.
Darwin, who developed his theory of evolution after studying the islands' endemic species, missed the pink iguana because he did not visit its only habitat - the active Wolf volcano on Isabela, the archipelago's largest island, according to the biologists.
Although a ranger from the national park first caught a glimpse of the reptile in 1986, this is the first time it has been studied.
Sbordoni and Gentile's research has been published in American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On The Origin of Species, a landmark work in evolutionary biology.
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Bianca
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Re: Pink Iguana Species Discovered In The Galapagos
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January 06, 2009, 07:47:07 am »
Pink iguanas unseen by Darwin offer evolution clue
Michael Kahn Michael Kahn –
Mon Jan 5, 2009
LONDON
(Reuters)
– Pink iguanas unknown to Charles Darwin during his visits to the Galapagos islands may provide evidence of species divergence far earlier than the English naturalist's famous finches, researchers said Monday.
The findings also for the first time describe the black-striped reptiles -- first seen in 1986 and only a few more times since -- as a new species, said Gabriele Gentile of the University Tor Vergata in Rome, who led the study.
They also add to understanding of the evolution of species on the remote islands, which remain much as they were millions of years ago and which inspired Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Many of its species are found nowhere else.
"Despite the attention given to them, the Galapagos have not yet finished offering evolutionary novelties," Gentile and colleagues wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"So far, this species is the only evidence of ancient diversification along the Galapagos land iguana lineage and documents one of the oldest events of divergence ever recorded in the Galapagos."
During Darwin's visit to the Galapagos in 1835 his observations of finch varieties with different-shaped beaks scattered across the archipelago's some 100 islands were a key element in his formulation of the principles of evolution.
His studies on how one type had evolved into several after a probable chance migration thousands of years earlier from the Latin American mainland lay at the heart of his major work "On the Origin of Species," published in 1859.
As the finches spread around the islands and their populations became cut off from each other, the birds adapted to the food locally available by developing beaks of a shape most suitable to harvest it, his research showed.
Darwin did not visit areas inhabited by the pink land iguana and so missed the species, whose existence suggests diversification in the Galapagos happened some five million years ago. That is far earlier than attributed to most other Galapagos species like the finches, Gentile said.
"We were not the first to see this form but we were the first to say what it is and that it is a new species," Gentile said in a telephone interview.
A genetic analysis showed that the pink reptile likely originated in the Galapagos and split from other iguana populations some five million years ago when the archipelago was still forming, the researchers said.
The creatures only seem to live near a single volcano at most 350,000 years old, which means the reptiles that grow longer than a meter and up to 12 kilograms must have at one time existed elsewhere in the Galapagos, Gentile said.
The researchers documented fewer than 40 of the iguanas over two years and Gentile said conservation efforts and funds are urgently needed to keep the species from dying off.
"We think the population is very small and there is a great risk of extinction," Gentile said.
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; editing by Jon Boyle)
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Bianca
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Re: Pink Iguana Species Discovered In The Galapagos
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Reply #3
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January 09, 2009, 09:55:13 am »
Pink Iguana Is Distinct in Other Ways Too
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: January 5, 2009
The New York Times
Charles Darwin was about as keen an observer of nature as ever walked the earth, but even he missed the pink iguana of the Galápagos.
The pink iguana, found on a Galápagos volcano, diverged from other land iguanas 5.7 million years ago.
The rare land iguanas were first seen, in fact, only in 1986, when one was spotted by park rangers on Volcan Wolf on the island of Isabela. Since then they have been found only on that volcano, which would explain why Darwin missed them, since he didn’t explore it.
Now Gabriele Gentile of the University of Rome Tor Vergata and colleagues say that the pink iguana is distinct from the two recognized species of land iguana on the Galápagos. Though they have yet to formally describe and name the species, they refer to it as the rosada form (rosada being the Spanish word for pink).
An analysis by the researchers, reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that there is significant genetic isolation between the rosada form and Conolophus subcristatus, a yellow iguana that also lives on Volcan Wolf. And besides the obvious difference in color, there are differences in morphology between the two reptiles, the researchers say.
Their genetic analysis suggests that the rosada form diverged from the other land iguana lineages about 5.7 million years ago. Since Volcan Wolf formed much more recently, the current distribution of the pink iguanas only on that volcano represents something of a riddle, the researchers report.
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