Scientists Create All-Female Species of Lizard

New all-female lizards, bred in the lab in one generation

We've all heard about those weird lizard species that are all-female and breed parthenogenically—basically, they clone themselves. But how long does it take for natural selection to evolve a species into that state? Apparently, not real long at all. It's just luck of the draw on having the right parents.

In a lab in Kansas, Aracely Lutes has created a new species of all-female lizard that reproduces by cloning itself. There wasn't any genetic engineering involved; Lutes did it with just a single round of breeding ...
Some groups are exceptionally good at making hybrids. ... The North American whiptail lizards (Aspidoscelis) are grandmasters at it. The genomes of the living lizards testify to their weird origins, but it's much harder to actually witness these beginnings. When scientists find first-generation hybrid whiptails in the wild, they're almost always sterile. One group even spent 29 years trying to breed a new hybrid species in the lab, a project that involved 230 lizards, nine species, five sterile hybrids, and zero success.
There has been one tantalizing exception to this catalog of failure. In 1967, William Neaves (who was also involved in this new study) described two eggs that had been laid by a hybrid lizard, the offspring of a Western whiptail (A.inornata) and a Chihuahuan spotted whiptail (A.exsanguis; itself a hybrid). The lizard seemed fertile, but its eggs dried out before they could hatch. No one could prove that the hybrid would truly have raised viable young.
But that was enough for Lutes. She set about trying to breed a hybrid whiptail, using the same combination of parent species that Neaves described.
She succeeded.

One generation, new species—All-female lizard bred in the lab

Who needs males when you have parthenogenesis? With a little help from science, biologist Peter Baumann and colleagues have created an all-female lizard species:

Researchers have bred a new species of all-female lizard, mimicking a process that has happened naturally in the past but has never been directly observed.
“It’s recreating the events that lead to new species,” said cell biologist Peter Baumann of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose new species is described May 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It relates to the question of how these unisexual species arise in the first place.”

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