Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 75

An adaptive radiation is the adaptation of a species to a new environment. When new environments open up — for example, when a land bridge connects two previously separated continents or islands — life forms normally migrate into these new environments. If they survive, the colonists adapt to the new ecological conditions and, over evolutionary time, become adapted to those conditions. When the colonists are so different from their ancestral population (the ones who didn’t cross the land bridge, for example) that they can no longer interbreed with those ancestral forms, speciation has occurred.