EARTH.COM - Wild tomatoes rooted on the raw lava of Fernandina and Isabela Islands have done something biologists once filed under “nearly impossible,” reviving a molecular defense that disappeared from their relatives millions of years ago during species evolution.
The phenomenon has been traced to a tiny tweak in the plants’ chemistry, and it now stands as the clearest plant example of reverse evolution, the re‑emergence of an ancestral trait after a long dormancy.
Lead author Adam Jozwiak at the University of California, Riverside, working with colleagues from the Weizmann Institute, mapped the unexpected comeback.