Off the Dalmatian coast, the Adriatic Sea is dotted with small, usually deserted islets, many of which are bare rock and brush too small to show up on standard maps. Pod Kopiste and Pod Mrcaru are two of these landmasses that are located close to the bigger island of Lastovo, only a few km apart. Other than the lizards that crawled across its limestone, they received very little attention for decades. The landscape was altered by a little experiment conducted by biologist Eviatar Nevo and his associates, which turned out to be one of the clearest real-time examples of evolution in a vertebrate species documented so far.
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