The New York Times science section has a piece today on the white lizards discoverd in White Sands, NM. Call me a geek if you like but I think this is totally cool!
These little guys mutated very quickly (relatively speaking) to be able to camoflauge themselves in the snowy white sand dunes in New Mexico that formed only about 6,000 years ago.
From the piece:
From an evolutionary perspective, that’s really the blink of an eye
There are so many examples of this kind of thing happening around the world but I find this one amazing because it's so recent and happened so quickly.
And yet some people still deny evolution??? It just boggles the mind.
When we can see changes like this happening so quickly- only a few thousand years- who knows what could happen in millions of years! I mean, is that such a hard concept to grasp? I would think it would have to at least make you wonder about what the possiblities are.
Anyway, you should check out the pic of the white lizard next to the brown one he mutated from. I would put it up but I never quite grasped the whole pic thing on here.
Here's the article link: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Erica Bree Rosenblum, a professor at the University of Idaho who has been studying evolution at White Sands for much of the past decade. Her focus has been on three lizard species that elsewhere are dark skinned but in White Sands have each evolved a white-skinned variety that makes them hard to find. "It’s really obvious what’s happened," Dr. Rosenblum said. "Everybody got white so that they could better escape from their predators." It’s a great example of convergent evolution, of species independently acquiring the same traits.
Just thought I'd share this with you guys.