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From: RonO <rokimoto@cox.net>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Science has a news article up about "living fossils"
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 18:17:23 -0500
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https://www.science.org/content/article/these-gars-are-ultimate-living-fossils

Open access article:
https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpae028/7615529?login=false

These researchers looked at Gar, but it also applies to sturgeons. 
These two bony fish lineages seem to have a very slow rate of molecular 
evolution.  The changes in their DNA accumulate so slowly that two 
lineages separated for over 100 million years can still form fertile 
hybrids.  3 million years is pushing it for species like lions and 
tigers that can still form hybrids, but the hybrids are sterile. 
Bonobos and chimps are around 3 million years divergent and can still 
form fertile hybrids, but the claim is that these fish evolve orders of 
magnitude more slowly than mammals.

The Science news article claims that mammals accumulate 0.02 mutations 
per site per million years, while these fish averaged only 0.00009 
mutations per million years.  For the 1100 coding exons that they looked 
at for this study these fish evolve much more slowly than mammals.

The news article notes that other "living fossils" such as coelacanths 
(0.0005) evolve faster, but slower than amphibians (0.007).  It sounds 
like terrestrial animals evolve faster than fish.

Ron Okimoto