Adjusted for gar “evolution” over 150 million years 😅😎👍🐟🦖 Fun Fact: gars have the slowest rates of evolution among all jawed vertebrates! - ThreadSky

solomonrdavid.bsky.social • 33 days ago

Adjusted for gar “evolution” over 150 million years 😅😎👍🐟🦖

Fun Fact: gars have the slowest rates of evolution among all jawed vertebrates!

Comments

leahshaffer.bsky.social•32 days ago

Evolution looking at the chart.
"Looks like a rocket ship that shoots slime. My work here is done."

cryogaijin.bsky.social•32 days ago

How would Arapaima compare? Got any good Gar pictures you can share?

denwalt.bsky.social•33 days ago

nyoei.bsky.social•33 days ago

You made me grin. This is perfect :D

trashcannie.bsky.social•33 days ago

That IS a fun fact! Is there any explanation or guesses for “why”? Or do they just have That Good Design

nullprose.bsky.social•31 days ago

mutation rates and environment are primary drivers in evolution. Fish have lower mutation rates, and gar have the lowest known mutation rates of all known jaded vertebrates.

In fact, the rates of mutation are so low that different species that diverged millions of years ago can still hybridize

nullprose.bsky.social•31 days ago

with each other, which underlines the minute differences even in long separated species of gar.

trashcannie.bsky.social•31 days ago

:O that is super cool?!?!!?! I’m obsessed now, thank you for sharing!!

nullprose.bsky.social•31 days ago

if you're interested here is some follow up reading. I admittedly got most of what I shared from this site.

I'm no expert, just a passionate dork 😜🤓

https://www.science.org/content/article/these-gars-are-ultimate-living-fossils

nullprose.bsky.social•31 days ago

In almost every exon, gars had the slowest rates of molecular substitution, often by several orders of magnitude, and averaged only 0.00009 mutations per million years at each site. Indeed, two genera that diverged roughly 20 million years ago had identical sequences at nearly all the sites analyzed

spookybugdog.bsky.social•33 days ago

"Don't fix what ain't broken." - Gar

logidiot.bsky.social•33 days ago

What about the fellas without jaws?

mindfulmayhem.bsky.social•33 days ago

Why? Do they have a long life span or something about the way they reproduce? Or just don't need to evolve?

vilja.bsky.social•33 days ago

I feel this implies that tyrannosaurs are converging to gars.
garcinisation?

birdiero.bsky.social•33 days ago

Garannoception

k3l2025.bsky.social•33 days ago

Fascinating!!!

mcmcfee.bsky.social•33 days ago

@ sethmeyers

elisebodnyk.bsky.social•32 days ago

That IS a fun fact!

mwharris.bsky.social•33 days ago

Everything is crab, eventually*

* Gar not included

solomonrdavid.bsky.social•33 days ago

😂😂😂👍

gwiggs.bsky.social•33 days ago

If it ain't broke

hansolo318.bsky.social•33 days ago

Slowest rate genetically, morphologically, or both?

vilja.bsky.social•33 days ago

I think we should discover or invent an organism with high rate of morphological change but near-standstill pace of genetic evolution

perahlberg.bsky.social•33 days ago

This is because they have achieved perfection.

solomonrdavid.bsky.social•32 days ago

Some background on those SUPER-SLOW evolutionary rates in gars @scifri.bsky.social with lead author @chasebrownstein.bsky.social, myself, and Ira Flatow: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/gar-living-fossil-genome/ 🐟🧪

meghstar.bsky.social•32 days ago

You’re perfect, honey. Never change.

rolfmarschalek.bsky.social•32 days ago

Dear Salomon…i have an idea why this is the case…it has something to do with the amount of nuclear RNA. Species with a high amount have a slow evolution, because the RNA can be used for templated DNA repair…if you like, contact me for discussion

rolfmarschalek.bsky.social•32 days ago

We have published on that topic…and have this mechanism

humerus-hormesis.bsky.social•33 days ago

Could we get 7 movies out of "Garassic Park"?

c-ocelot.bsky.social•33 days ago

Hay if the design works the design works. It's like dip pens, I need a pen that can use pigment ink and it turns out that design was perfect when we added metal to our feathers.

keithdonovan.bsky.social•33 days ago

I love that you saw that graph and you were like this has a tragic lack of gar

keithdonovan.bsky.social•33 days ago

Now the graph is sufficiently garish

vilja.bsky.social•33 days ago

garph

simond1954.bsky.social•32 days ago

The coelacanth which is little changed in 410 million years must be well up in the front running for little changed over an extended time period.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12027

solomonrdavid.bsky.social•32 days ago

Gar genome was shown to be more slowly evolving than coelacanth and lungfish 😮
https://www.science.org/content/article/these-gars-are-ultimate-living-fossils

simond1954.bsky.social•32 days ago

Wow amazing.

blackwidowaleksis.bsky.social•33 days ago

So gar’s been licking bread for over 150 million years?

susansnoozin.bsky.social•33 days ago

Why are they still called a gar if their most-recent shared ancestor is so far down the taxonomy tree? 🤔 I would expect it to be called a "false gar" or even a "fool's gar."

bnd.wtf•33 days ago

Because they are already perfect

ella0nearth.bsky.social•32 days ago

Hard to improve on perfect ❤️

mrwillisofohio.bsky.social•33 days ago

Must have been 15 years ago but I read a book about how the AK47 is a near perfect machine. Awful that it exists but from an engineering standpoint wildly impressive.

Gar are similar.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply