1. Tuatara once ranged throughout New Zealand before rats, cats, and stoats - introduced by human colonizers - wiped them out.

2. The tuatara rate is significantly faster than for animals including the cave bear, lion, ox and horse.

3. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined.

4. Tuatara have such a slow lifestyle that they probably won't adapt to the temperature bumps modeled in this study, according to Mitchell.

5. Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly -- they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism -- would have evolved slowly.

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6. The tuatara of New Zealand is the only extant rhynchocephalian.

7. Photo Gallery: Jurassic Period Clinging to life on an offshore crag, a tuatara looks little different from his Jurassic relatives.

8. Professor Lambert says the finding will be helpful in terms of future study and conservation of the tuatara, and the team now hopes to extend the work to look at the evolution of other animal species.

9. Among the several subclasses (or "orders" in biology) of reptiles are snakes and lizards, turtles and tortoises, crocodiles and alligators, and the tuatara, a marine lizard in New Zealand.

10. However, while a boost in temperature generally results in a nest full of more females than males, the opposite is true for tuatara whose offspring skew toward male in warmer climes.