|
|
 24 Galapagos tortoise DHJanzen101237.jpg high resolution
|
|
| Vastly larger than a grapefruit, the ancestor of this adult and hundred-year-plus-old Galapagos tortoise rafted to the Galapagos islands off the Pacific coast of Ecuador at a time when sea level was about 100 m lower (i.e., much more ice accumulated in glaciers in high latitudes) and thus there was much less sea between the continental coast and the islands. Once on the islands, in the absence of both predators and competitors, there was the same general class of selective pressures that gave us the dodo and the Sechylles coconut (coco de mer). | ||
back to lecture slides
or skip to: