From: invalide@invalid.invalid   
      
   https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/17/iguanas-floated-one-fifth-o   
   -the-way-around-the-world-to-colonize-fiji/   
      
   Iguanas have often been spotted rafting around   
   the Caribbean on vegetation and, ages ago,   
   evidently caught a 600-mile ride from Central   
   America to colonize the Galapagos Islands. But   
   for long distance travel, the Fiji iguanas   
   can’t be touched.   
      
   A new analysis conducted by biologists at the   
   University of California, Berkeley, and the   
   University of San Francisco (USF) suggests   
   that sometime after about 34 million years   
   ago, Fiji iguanas landed on the isolated group   
   of South Pacific islands after voyaging 5,000   
   miles from the western coast of North America   
   — the longest known transoceanic dispersal of   
   any terrestrial vertebrate.   
   ...   
   The new analysis, to be published next week   
   in the journal Proceedings of the National   
   Academy of Sciences, suggests that the arrival   
   of the ancestors of the Fiji iguanas coincided   
   with the formation of these volcanic islands.   
   The estimated time of the arrival, 34 million   
   years ago or more recently, is based on the   
   timing of the genetic divergence of the Fiji   
   iguanas, Brachylophus, from their closest   
   relatives, the North American desert iguanas,   
   Dipsosaurus.   
   ...   
   “We found that the Fiji iguanas are most   
   closely related to the North American desert   
   iguanas, something that hadn’t been figured   
   out before, and that the lineage of Fiji   
   iguanas split from their sister lineage   
   relatively recently, much closer to 30 million   
   years ago, either post-dating or at about the   
   same time that there was volcanic activity   
   that could have produced land,” said lead   
   author Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist and   
   paleontologist who is a former postdoctoral   
   fellow at  UC Berkeley and is now an assistant   
   professor at USF in the Department of   
   Environmental Science.   
   ...   
      
   The paper is here   
      
   https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318622122   
   Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from   
   North America to Fiji   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)