As a femur-shaped island paradise that snapped away from the Gondwana supercontinent some 80 million years ago, New Zealand is famously home to eccentric forms of wildlife that look like pets for a Hobbit.
There is the kiwi, of course, with its dense, furlike feathers, its catlike whiskers and its long, slender, curving bill tipped by a pair of ultrasensitive nostrils; and the kakapo, a heavy, flightless, nocturnal parrot with the flat-cheeked face of an owl; and the giant weta, a cricket the size of a human hand that displays by waving its formidably serrated rear legs high in the air as if brandishing a pair of saws.
Yet the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.
In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/23/science/23angier.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a210
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