Just as when a new cocktail is invented by mixing old ingredients, evolution sometimes makes a brand new species by mixing old ones. One such remarkable example is the Kinda baboon (picture) that inhabits large parts of Angola, Zimbabwe, and Dem. rep. Congo. Two ancestral baboon species had followed separate evolutionary paths for about one and a half million years until they met only 150 thousand years ago and fused to create the Kinda baboon. This surprising finding is part of a study that we just published in Science Advances, as part of a large international collaboration with important contributions from the Mailund and Schierup labs at BiRC.

The evolution and diversification of life are nicely depicted by a tree – with the original first living organism at the root and the main branches splitting into still smaller branches and twigs that eventually lead to the living species at the leaves. But what about all the species that went extinct, you may ask. The dinosaurs found themselves in dire straits 65 million years ago. In fact, species go extinct all the time. Whereas recently emerged species most likely persist, species that arose hundreds of million years ago have most likely gone extinct since then. This continuously removes twigs and branches from the tree of life, which is why it has ended up looking like, well, a tree.

Read more…

You can run Jupyter notebook in your browser from a compute node on the cluster. This way your analysis runs on the file system where your data is, and you can keep data, code and documentation in one place. It only works using Chrome browser.
Read more…