Turtles genetically closer to birds
© Marcel Hurni / Fotolia
Researchers at the University of Boston have confirmed that turtles are more closely genetically linked with crocodilians and birds than lizards and snakes, as previously thought.
The researchers, who looked at more than a thousand of the least-changed regions in the genomes of turtles and their closest relatives, published their findings in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Nick Crawford, a post-graduate researcher in biology and lead author of the research, commented: "Turtles have been an enigmatic vertebrate group for a long time and morphological studies placed them as either most closely related to the ancestral reptiles, that diverged early in the reptile evolutionary tree, or as closer to lizards, snakes, and tuataras."
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