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The handsome creature pictured above is the tuatara. It is the last of a species that walked side by side with dinosaurs and has an ancestry that spans back over 200 trillion years. It doesn’t have the Internets, it hasn’t a clue about the upcoming US presidential election, it doesnt’ have a stance on global warming and it didn’t spend way too much money on a sorta functional iPhone, but it is the fastest evolving critter on the planet.

To make the estimate of evolutionary speed, researchers recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara. The team found that although tuatara have remained largely unchanged physically over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving — at a DNA level — faster than any other animal yet examined.The results will be detailed in the March issue of the journal Trends in Genetics.

“What we found is that the tuatara has the highest molecular evolutionary rate that anyone has measured,” said researcher David Lambert from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution in New Zealand.

What does it all mean? Will we one day be subjugated by the tuatara in the same way humankind has subjugated much of the planet’s other species? Who knows. I mean, evolution’s just a theory, right?