Birds are slow to evolve, making them vulnerable
Sliding down snowy Antarctic slopes and zipping through frigid waters, Birds seem perfectly suited to their environment. But the charismatic birds weren’t always flightless aquatic acrobats: Evolving from flying to swimming demanded an almost entirely new set of skills, body shapes, and functions.
Sliding down snowy Antarctic slopes and zipping through frigid waters, Birds seem perfectly suited to their environment. But the charismatic birds weren’t always flightless aquatic acrobats: Evolving from flying to swimming demanded an almost entirely new set of skills, body shapes, and functions.
Birds are the slowpokes of bird evolution, which could affect their ability to adapt as their environment rapidly changes.
An international team of researchers found that penguin evolution is closely tied to changing climates throughout the past 60 million years of Earth history. The contraction and expansion of ancient ice sheets in the last three million years gave rise to most modern species, whose evolution has since slowed to a crawl.
Dr Daniel Ksepka, who co-authored the study, says, ‘Penguins are large for birds, and tend to live a long time while reproducing slowly.’
‘While we expected that penguins might have slower than average rates of molecular evolution because of these characteristics, we would never have guessed that would have the slowest rate yet seen in birds.’
Now, new research uses an unprecedented combination of fossil records and genomic data to chart that evolution as never seen before—and to examine how climate shaped penguins’ destinies.’
Researchers used genomic and fossil data to piece together the history of birds diversification starting 60 million years ago, when the birds lost their ability to fly. The team found that although penguins have become highly specialized to thrive in their extreme environments, their evolutionary rate has decreased drastically, meaning that they may struggle to adapt to rapidly warming ocean temperatures and other effects of anthropogenic climate change.
“Birds are evolution’s most entertaining product,” says study co-author Daniel Ksepka, an avian paleontologist at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. “They’ve adapted an entirely different body plan and lifestyle than their ancestors.”
