Two distantly - related mintage that split 60 million years ago have acquire an young on the forest floor of the French Pyrenees . We ’re talking about ferns , but still , reuniting after such a long evolutionary breakup is roughly akin to an elephant hybridizing with a Trichechus manatus , or us with a lemur , consort tofindingspublished in the March issue ofAmerican Naturalist .
Reproducing after that long is impossible for most mintage of plants and animals : the genetic inconsistency will have become too huge . It only takes a few million years to become reproductively unsuited to each other – a central consideration for the organic evolution of new species . Until now , the most extreme examples have been tree diagram frogs cook baby frogs 34 million years after splitting into separate lineages , and sunfish hybridizing after a 40 - million - year split .
This new unlikely making love child made its mode into a baby’s room from the mountains of France . Once there , a squad led byCarl Rothfels from the University of British Columbia(formerly of Duke ) extracted deoxyribonucleic acid from its fronds to identify its lineage . Their analyses revealed that the pallid hybrid fern , xCystocarpium roskamianum , comes from a cross between an oak fern and a delicate fern . " To most people they just look like two ferns , but to fern researchers these two groups expect really different , " Rothfels explain in anews release . While the two can both be found co - exist throughout the northerly hemisphere , they lay off commute genes and diverged from each other around 60 million long time ago .
The researchers suppose that the parent fern stay on compatible after call in it quits so long ago because fern do n’t swear on the shuttlecock and bee , literally . Fern sex , like many other living being , brings the spermatozoan together with the eggs . But all they call for are flatus and water , whereas lots of other plants calculate on an fauna pollinator . These animals might , over time , become finicky about flower shape or size or some other trait . “ It ’s enticing to suppose that there ’s something particular about blossom plants that give them a competitory advantage,”Rothfels adds , “ but these results raise a different possibility . ”
Since ferns do n’t swear on beast in this manner , reproductive incompatibility for them in all probability just evolves more slowly . That ’s in all probability why there are right smart more flowering plant species than fern species – even though the latter have been around so much longer , predating even dinosaurs .
