Research co-authored by an Oklahoma Museum of Natural History curator, her graduate student and an international team of scientists has shed new light on the evolutionary “tool kit” animals use to survive environmental change.
The study, published in Communications Biology, was led by Marcos da Cruz, a University of Oklahoma Ph.D. student in the laboratory of Dr. Hayley Lanier, Associate Curator of Mammals at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, who also co-authored the research.
Along with an international team of collaborators from the Czech Academy of Sciences, the researchers discovered that much of the genetic variation these animals use to adapt to new environments was inherited from their distant ancestors rather than newly evolved adaptations developed in response to changing conditions.
