Iguanas floated a whopping 5,000 miles from North America to Fiji on rafts of plants in a record-setting trip, study suggests
by Margherita Bassi, Daily Correspondent

Smithsonian Magazine    Translate This Article
24 March 2025

On 24 March 2025 Smithsonian Magazine reported: Since most iguana species live in the Americas, biologists have long debated how they could have arrived on the remote Pacific island in the first place. Iguanas inhabit tropical, subtropical and desert regions of the Americas -- but surprisingly, they're also found on a few incredibly remote Pacific islands, such as Fiji. Exactly how iguanas could have reached these islands in the first place is a hotly debated topic. Global Good News service views this news as a sign of rising positivity in the field of science, documenting the growth of life-supporting, evolutionary trends.

'The question has definitely captured the imagination of scientists and the public alike,' Simon Scarpetta, an evolutionary biologist at the University of San Francisco, tells the New York Times' Asher Elbein.

Now, Scarpetta and his colleagues have offered an answer to that question, and it involves a record-breaking journey. In a study published Monday [17 March] in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they suggest the lizards hitched a 5,000-mile ride on floating vegetation from the western coast of North America within the past 34 million years. That trip would be the longest transoceanic dispersal of any terrestrial vertebrate known to scientists.

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