Re: 30-34 mya Iguanas rafted from North America to Fiji

On 3/18/2025 11:33 AM, RonO wrote:

On 3/17/2025 10:30 PM, Pro Plyd wrote:

>
https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/17/iguanas-floated-one-fifth-of-the- way-around-the-world-to-colonize-fiji/
>
Iguanas have often been spotted rafting around
the Caribbean on vegetation and, ages ago,
evidently caught a 600-mile ride from Central
America to colonize the Galapagos Islands. But
for long distance travel, the Fiji iguanas
can’t be touched.
>
A new analysis conducted by biologists at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the
University of San Francisco (USF) suggests
that sometime after about 34 million years
ago, Fiji iguanas landed on the isolated group
of South Pacific islands after voyaging 5,000
miles from the western coast of North America
— the longest known transoceanic dispersal of
any terrestrial vertebrate.
...
The new analysis, to be published next week
in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, suggests that the arrival
of the ancestors of the Fiji iguanas coincided
with the formation of these volcanic islands.
The estimated time of the arrival, 34 million
years ago or more recently, is based on the
timing of the genetic divergence of the Fiji
iguanas, Brachylophus, from their closest
relatives, the North American desert iguanas,
Dipsosaurus.
...
“We found that the Fiji iguanas are most
closely related to the North American desert
iguanas, something that hadn’t been figured
out before, and that the lineage of Fiji
iguanas split from their sister lineage
relatively recently, much closer to 30 million
years ago, either post-dating or at about the
same time that there was volcanic activity
that could have produced land,” said lead
author Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist and
paleontologist who is a former postdoctoral
fellow at  UC Berkeley and is now an assistant
professor at USF in the Department of
Environmental Science.
...
>
The paper is here
>
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318622122
Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from
North America to Fiji
>

 They are thinking that it was a pretty substantial raft of vegetation. Why didn't the Polynesians distribute these iguanas across the South Pacific?  They supposedly taste good, and would have been easier to transport than pigs.

The AIG should be talking up this research.  When I visited their creation museum in Kentucky they had an exhibit claiming that continental drift had occurred within the year of the global flood (the current continents moved thousands of miles to their current positions within a year during the flood.  Another claim was that there were giant living rafts of vegetation (small islands) floating around at the time and all the animals, like marsupials, got back to Australia to where it had moved during the flood on these giant rafts of vegetation.  I guess none of the carnivores were eating meat at this time and all the pairs of herbivores made it back to places like Australia and the Americas with devine assistance.  The ones that went back to antarctica didn't do so well.
Ron Okimoto

 Ron Okimoto