Gigantic Genomes and Supersized Salamander Cells Surprise Scientists and Put a Wrinkle in Evolutionary Theory
Does the size of a creature’s cells or genome specify its evolutionary path? That was what we thought, but data from salamanders question whether this is really the case.
Once upon a time, I thought that salamanders were just cute little beasties that toddled along around creeks or the forest and served some kind of link in food chains but never gave them any more thought than that.
Well, I’ve been dispelled of that idea. There’s definitely more to them than I dreamed of when I was a kid. If you’ve been following me for a while, you might remember this post I did about an interesting salamander, the axolotl.
In that post, I took you through the typical salamander life cycle, but here it is again for a quick reminder. We’ll refer to it again later in the post, but basically, they mate, the adult female lays the eggs, the eggs hatch into larvae, and the larvae pass through a stage of development (paedomorph) to ultimately become adult salamanders.
Pretty neat and simple. But if you follow the arrows in the diagram below, you can see that there are some other “options,” which…
