Snakes are built to evolve at incredible speeds, and scientists aren't sure why
Snakes have a supercharged evolutionary clock that enables them to adapt at far faster rates than other reptiles, scientists have discovered. This ability has helped them become evolutionary "winners" and spread across the planet. " Snakes are like the Big Bang 'singularity' in cosmology — a dramatic expansion of diversity in species and their ecologies, linked to some event that might have occurred early in the evolutionary History of snakes," lead author Pascal Title , a evolutionary macroecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said in a statement. In a new study, published Thursday (Feb. 22) in the journal Science , the researchers investigated what makes animal groups evolutionary winners — in particular, why certain groups are able to diversify into more species and appear better at surviving events like mass extinctions — study author Daniel Rabosky , an evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, whose research focuses on macr...