About 34 million years ago, iguanas sailed 5,000 miles from western North America and settled in Fiji. It’s not uncommon for iguana species to hop a natural raft and drift to a new island, but according to new research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this may be the “the longest known transoceanic dispersal of any terrestrial vertebrate.”
"We found that the Fiji iguanas are most closely related to the North American desert iguanas, something that hadn't been figured out before,” said lead study author Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist, and paleontologist who is a former postdoctoral fellow at University of California Berkeley, in a press release.
Most life that finds its way to newly-formed islands typically comes via overwater dispersal. Organisms such as plants and animals, and even humans, find their way to these new islands and take up residence. On these islands, new ecosystems and species ...
