Tuatara: Taking it Easy?

BBC News features research undertaken by Victoria University Tuatara Research Group (Professor Charles Daugherty and student Nicola Nelson) into the habitat of New Zealand’s “living fossil”, the tuatara. “They’ve been around since the time of the dinosaurs, so they’ve been through climate change before and survived, whereas dinosaurs didn’t, so they must have some mechanisms for coping with it.” “Yesterday’s reptile” also stars in a Guardian special that asks of the cold-blooded animal that breathes just once an hour: “How much longer can Sphenodon punctatus sit at the mouth of its burrow, and watch the aeons go by?”