There's something ironic about the fact that the fastest evolving animal right now is an endangered species. This is the tuatara, a species of lizard that resides in New Zealand.

Just because we humans are at the top of the food chain doesn't mean we're the fastest evolving beings out there. We're just the success stories of evolution.

At the DNA level, the tuatara outstrips us all, according to scientists from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution. Says David Lambert, head of the study: "What we found is that the tuatara has the highest molecular evolutionary rate that anyone has measured."

There's a lot of things ironic with this fact. First of all, the tuatara hasn't changed for a long period of time now. They're actually called New Zealand's "living dinosaur." Also, the tuatara are slooooo-ooo-oooow creatures. As Lambert explains:

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.

The discovery proves a long-controversial theory that molecular evolution is "uncoupled" from the rate of morphological evolution (that's our form and structure as an organism). The study hopes to be able to go on and measure the rate of human molecular evolution.