Evolution Changes Animals a Lot More Quickly Than Expected, New Chicken Study Reveals

Evolution may occur much faster than previously thought. After studying individual chickens that were part of a long-term pedigree, researchers found two mutations that had occurred in the mitochondrial genomes of the birds after only 50 years.

In this latest study, the researchers used a well-documented 50-year pedigree of a population of White Plymouth Rock chickens. The researchers constructed how the mitochondrial DNA passed from mothers to daughters within the population. They did so by analyzing DNA from the blood samples of 12 chickens of the same generation using the most distantly related maternal lines. A selective mating approach actually caused a tenfold difference in the size of the chickens in the two groups when weighed at 56 days old.

"Our observations reveal that evolution is always moving quickly but we tend not to see it because we typically measure it over long time periods," said Greger Larson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Our study shows that evolution can move much faster in the short term than we had believed from fossil-based estimates. Previously, estimates put the rate of change in a mitochondrial genome at about 2 percent per million years. At this pace, we should not have been able to spot a single mutation in just 50 years, but in fact we spotted two."

The findings reveal that evolution occurs far more quickly than first expected. This may tell scientists a bit more about past species and the flow of genetic information.

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

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