Case Study: Evolution of Turtles
This study explores the evolution of turtles by focusing on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). By looking at the rate of mutation in different species of Testudine turtles. The result of this study is a noted decrease in mtDNA mutation rate in this clade of turtles. The authors do not know why this is, but they believe it is related to turtle's slow metabolic rate, the long generation length, and the accuracy of their DNA polymerase. The evolution of turtles is one of the most disputed subjects in evolutionary biology at this time. The paleontological data is incomplete and sparse. This is just an example of how evolutionary biology is done to piece together a phylogeny (a tree of ancestry): evidence is gathered from different fields such as genetic information of living species (it is difficult to even identify living species' relationship to each other at times due sometimes to convergent evolution (when the same adaptation occurs in separate species at separate times) and fossils. These are the two main sources of information which evolutionary biologists utilize.
This page was made for Honors 210, a course offered at Monmouth College