Dwarf crocodiles split into three species

Friday, December 12, 2008 - 15:07 in Biology & Nature

You'd think that if scientists were to discover a new species, it would be in some remote, uncharted tropical forest, not a laboratory in New York. But a team from the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History has done the unexpected. Looking at the genes of the African dwarf crocodile, researchers found that the group—genetically speaking—comprises three distinct species rather than one. This not only ends a long debate about the taxonomy of this group, previously thought to consist of two closely related subspecies, but also defines a new, distinct species from genetic samples.

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