From Chris Woolston at Nature:
Researchers previously split giraffes into several subspecies on the basis of their coat patterns and where they lived. Closer inspection of their genes, however, reveals that giraffes should actually be divided into four distinct lineages that don’t interbreed in the wild, researchers report on 8 September in Current Biology1. Previous genetic studies2 have suggested that there were discrete giraffe populations that rarely intermingled, but this is the first to detect species-level differences, says Axel Janke, a geneticist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and the study’s senior author.
“It was an amazing finding,” he says. He notes that giraffes are highly mobile, wide-ranging animals that would have many chances to interbreed in the wild if they were so inclined: “The million-dollar question is what kept them apart in the past.” Janke speculates that rivers or other physical barriers kept populations separate long enough for new species to arise More.
See also: The common Asian toad is actually three. Speciation would have been a good topic for the Royal society to take up, had they carried through with their intention to rethink evolution
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