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From: RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: 30-34 mya Iguanas rafted from North America to Fiji
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2025 11:33:01 -0500
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On 3/17/2025 10:30 PM, Pro Plyd wrote:
> 
> https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/17/iguanas-floated-one-fifth-of-the- 
> way-around-the-world-to-colonize-fiji/
> 
> Iguanas have often been spotted rafting around
> the Caribbean on vegetation and, ages ago,
> evidently caught a 600-mile ride from Central
> America to colonize the Galapagos Islands. But
> for long distance travel, the Fiji iguanas
> can’t be touched.
> 
> A new analysis conducted by biologists at the
> University of California, Berkeley, and the
> University of San Francisco (USF) suggests
> that sometime after about 34 million years
> ago, Fiji iguanas landed on the isolated group
> of South Pacific islands after voyaging 5,000
> miles from the western coast of North America
> — the longest known transoceanic dispersal of
> any terrestrial vertebrate.
> ...
> The new analysis, to be published next week
> in the journal Proceedings of the National
> Academy of Sciences, suggests that the arrival
> of the ancestors of the Fiji iguanas coincided
> with the formation of these volcanic islands.
> The estimated time of the arrival, 34 million
> years ago or more recently, is based on the
> timing of the genetic divergence of the Fiji
> iguanas, Brachylophus, from their closest
> relatives, the North American desert iguanas,
> Dipsosaurus.
> ...
> “We found that the Fiji iguanas are most
> closely related to the North American desert
> iguanas, something that hadn’t been figured
> out before, and that the lineage of Fiji
> iguanas split from their sister lineage
> relatively recently, much closer to 30 million
> years ago, either post-dating or at about the
> same time that there was volcanic activity
> that could have produced land,” said lead
> author Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist and
> paleontologist who is a former postdoctoral
> fellow at  UC Berkeley and is now an assistant
> professor at USF in the Department of
> Environmental Science.
> ...
> 
> The paper is here
> 
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318622122
> Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from
> North America to Fiji
> 

They are thinking that it was a pretty substantial raft of vegetation. 
Why didn't the Polynesians distribute these iguanas across the South 
Pacific?  They supposedly taste good, and would have been easier to 
transport than pigs.

Ron Okimoto