Scaly sailors may have made a record-setting oceanic voyage. Tens of millions of years ago, iguanas in North America floated across the Pacific Ocean. Clinging to vegetation washed into the sea, they traveled one-fifth of the way around the world, eventually disembarking and settling in the islands of the South Pacific, researchers report March 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The seafaring lizards’ trip may be the longest known transocean emigration among land vertebrates.
“It’s just a truly incredible example of long-distance dispersal,” says Ethan Gyllenhaal, an evolutionary biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock who was not involved with the research.