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Asked by nugget to Ed, Sam, Steve, Vera on 22 Jun 2011.
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Steven Daly answered on 22 Jun 2011:
Breeds and species are different things. Breeds refer to animals of the same species that look different, like dogs. Species are different animals, that cannot breed with other species.
Species are probably forming all of the time, I think. So it is very likely.
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Sam Tazzyman answered on 22 Jun 2011:
New species are believed to be evolving all the time. The splitting of one species into two or more different species is called “speciation” and scientists are still investigating the details of how it works. One problem is that it happens very slowly (taking thousands of years) so people can’t really watch it happen. But there are some examples which could be one species slowly turning into several. One that I have worked on is a poisonous frog from Panama in Central America. On a collection of small islands near the coast there the frog can be found in an amazing variety of colours, one for each island:
These frogs are all the same species at the moment, but the females prefer to mate with males the same colour as them. In time these preferences could get so strong that the frogs on each island could become different species.
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Vera Weisbecker answered on 22 Jun 2011:
Steve and Sam are right, there are new species all the time. Breeds also pop up pretty quickly, dog breeds for example are pretty quickly established.
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