Abstract
Often dubbed ‘living fossils’ (because they seem not to have changed morphologically in >200 million years), tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus and Sphenodon guntheri) are endemic New Zealand reptiles that are the only extant members of an archaic order of reptiles, which diverged from squamates ∼250 million years ago. In a recent paper published in Trends in Genetics, Hay and colleagues used ancient DNA to examine the rate of molecular evolution in tuatara and suggested that tuatara have the highest rate of molecular evolution of any vertebrate studied to date [1].
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