MALARIA’s ability to infect species as diverse as humans, birds and mice led us to assume that species-specific parasite strains had slowly evolved along with their hosts. Now it seems that the explosion in vertebrate diversity happened well before the parasite was able to infect them, ruling out the co-evolution theory.
Vertebrates began to split from each other about 310 million years ago. But Toshiyuki Hayakawa at Osaka University in Japan and colleagues analysed the parasite’s mitochondrial genes and found that modern strains suddenly diverged from a common ancestor only 38 million years ago. In an upcoming paper in Molecular…
