“There was a mystery,” Pavón Vázquez says. “In this case the mystery was what is causing this conflict in the evolutionary relationship between the Komodo dragon and its close relation, the sand monitor.”
“What we found out is that millions of years ago, the Komodo dragon hybridised, which means it bred with another group of lizard.”
He said it was the first clear evidence of this type of interbreeding in wild monitor lizards.
The two species may be separated by an ocean, with the sand monitor only found in Australia and southern Papua New Guinea, but Pavón Vázquez said the research helped fill in gaps about what happened before the Komodo dragon became extinct on the southern continent.
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