The Galapagos Islands are famous in the scientific world because of Charles Darwin. But David Attenborough shined a new light on this fantastic island when he encountered a recently discovered pink iguana.
Iguanas were not the only reptiles Sir David Attenborough encountered on his visit. At the beginning of the video, the esteemed man took some time to speak about the island’s namesake: tortoises.
“A big one can weigh as much as a quarter of a ton,” said Attenborough. “They live up for a hundred years or more, which makes them amongst the most long-lived of all the vertebrates.”
While tortoises can float on the water, it is difficult to imagine such massive animals swimming all the way to the secluded islands. One of the prevailing theories was that some of these tortoises were swept up in a storm and gave birth on the island.
Over the years, the seclusion and lack of genetic diversity caused rapid changes in the evolutionary trajectory of the species. That brings us to the case of the pink iguana.
For years, researchers had believed there were only three species of iguanas on the islands: two species of yellow iguana and a black marine iguana. But recently, scientists discovered a pink iguana species that diverged from the other three iguanas over five million years ago.
Scientists were uncertain why the iguana was colored the way it was or if it was a relic species. “But there’s one thing that is quite certain,” said Attenborough. “And that is that there is a lot that we have yet to learn about the enchanted islands and about the animals that have evolved here.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4utR3S_znE
