Related Species
Based on genetic analyses, the closest relatives of the Vancouver Island Marmot are the Hoary Marmot (Marmota caligata) and the Olympic Marmot (Marmota olympus). There is some debate, on genetic grounds, about which of the two nearby mainland species is most closely related to the Vancouver Island marmot or when marmots first arrived on the island. The differences in DNA observed between species is small. In 2009, Nagorsen and Cardini identified, from museum specimens, substantial physical differences between species that can only be explained by rapid evolution in a relatively isolated island context. .
Read more about this topic: Vancouver Island Marmot
Famous quotes containing the words related and/or species:
“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)