Q: Which species is the youngest on Earth?A: Impossible to know for sure, but here is a candidate: the marbled crayfish, also known as Marmorkrebs.
It was discovered in aquariums in the mid 1990s, and has no known natural populations. It’s so unusual that if it was out there, it should have been noticed.
A major genetic difference between Marmorkrebs and their nearest relative is that Marmorkrebs is triploid: it has three sets of chromosomes, not two. The switch from two to three sets of chromosomes can occur in a single step, in one generation.
These give us some reason to believe it literally might not have existed long before the 1990s.
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Which species is the youngest on Earth?
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