New research has revealed that the Norwegian lemming is one of the youngest mammals on Earth. The team found that the Norwegian lemming split from its closest relative, the Western Siberian lemming, about 35,000 years ago. Although this may seem like a long time ago, from an evolutionary perspective, it might as well have been yesterday.
Scientists used advanced whole-genome sequencing to uncover the lemming’s surprising evolutionary history, with the results published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This recent split occurred during the climax of the last Ice Age, making the Norwegian lemming an incredibly unique evolutionary case.
“The Norwegian lemming is a key ecological species in the Fennoscandian tundra. Among other things, it serves as primary food for many predator species, including some threatened ones such as the Arctic fox,” said David Díez del Molino, a researcher at the Centre for Palaeogenetics and the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University, in a press release. “However, it is also a very interesting species from an evolutionary perspective, which so far has not been studied using genomics. Our study starts to fill that gap.”
