by Stuart Young, Programme Officer, IUCN SSC AWCSG
GSMP members Laurent Frantz, James Burton, Kristin Leus and Abdul Haris Mustari have re-cently published research on the evolution of Sulawesi’s endemic ungulates, including two GSMP taxa; anoa and babirusa. Working with a team of biologists and geol-ogists they used genetic data, morphometric data and geologi-cal reconstructions to show that these species colonised and spread across the island at differ-ent times. They also found that there is clear genetic and morpho-metric variation between the pop-ulations on different parts of the island, which could have implica-tions for their in situ conservation. This research was covered by the UK’s Guardian newspaper, show-ing that there is media interest in our GSMP species and research in-volving them!
This paper is open access, and can be found here:
Frantz LAF et al. 2018. Synchro-nous diversification of Sulawesi’s iconic artiodactyls driven by re-cent geological events. Proceed-ings of the Royal Society B 285: 20172566. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2566