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Asked by cocohamill2 to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 15 Jun 2011.
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Katie Marriott answered on 15 Jun 2011:
I’m not sure about this one! I think new species of animals are still being found in places like the Amazon. Because it is so big people are still exploring it (I think!).
Evolution is continuous as well so who knows what might evolve in the future!
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Steven Daly answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Evolution is a very slow process. A new species will take a long time to emerge in most animals, because it is linked to how fast they can reproduce. For an animal to be classes as a new species it has to be unable give fertile young with its relatives. That is why different breeds of dog are not different species, but for example lions and tigers are.
As Katie says, evolution is a continuous process – it happens all the time – so I am sure that somewhere on the planet there is a population of animals that are evolving into something new.
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Sam Tazzyman answered on 15 Jun 2011:
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 as Steven said 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 15 Jun 2011:
Like the others said, not at this moment (as in, this minute) but it can happen pretty quickly – it doesn’t always take millions of years. Two groups of similar animals are different species when they can’t or don’t reproduce for some reason. So if you can get two groups of essentially similar animals to stop having babies together, you can call them two species. This has been shown in fruit flies – check this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Drosophila_speciation_experiment.svg
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Ed Morrison answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Yes, definitely. As the others say the process takes some time, but some will be appearing right now. There are examples of bacteria that have evolved to live inside nuclear reactors which could only have evolved in the past 70 years or so, and bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics which evolved in the twentieth century.
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