Stunning hidden similarity found between bats, dolphins

t’s a small world after all—at least from an evolutionary standpoint. A new study from Queen Mary University of London and published in Nature has found that bats and dolphins, though virtually unrelated species, independently underwent the same evolutionary process to develop the highly specialized biological system echolocation.

“We had expected to find identical changes in maybe a dozen or so genes but to see [changes in] nearly 200 is incredible,” said lead author Joe Parker in a statement. “We know natural selection is a potent driver of gene sequence evolution, but identifying so many examples where it produces nearly identical results in the genetic sequences of totally unrelated animals is astonishing.”

Source: Here