https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/17/iguanas-floated-one-fifth-of-the-way-around-the-world-to-colonize-fiji/

Iguanas have often been spotted rafting around
the Caribbean on vegetation and, ages ago,
evidently caught a 600-mile ride from Central
America to colonize the Galapagos Islands. But
for long distance travel, the Fiji iguanas
can’t be touched.

A new analysis conducted by biologists at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the
University of San Francisco (USF) suggests
that sometime after about 34 million years
ago, Fiji iguanas landed on the isolated group
of South Pacific islands after voyaging 5,000
miles from the western coast of North America
— the longest known transoceanic dispersal of
any terrestrial vertebrate.
...
The new analysis, to be published next week
in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, suggests that the arrival
of the ancestors of the Fiji iguanas coincided
with the formation of these volcanic islands.
The estimated time of the arrival, 34 million
years ago or more recently, is based on the
timing of the genetic divergence of the Fiji
iguanas, Brachylophus, from their closest
relatives, the North American desert iguanas,
Dipsosaurus.
...
“We found that the Fiji iguanas are most
closely related to the North American desert
iguanas, something that hadn’t been figured
out before, and that the lineage of Fiji
iguanas split from their sister lineage
relatively recently, much closer to 30 million
years ago, either post-dating or at about the
same time that there was volcanic activity
that could have produced land,” said lead
author Simon Scarpetta, a herpetologist and
paleontologist who is a former postdoctoral
fellow at UC Berkeley and is now an assistant
professor at USF in the Department of
Environmental Science.
...

The paper is here

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318622122
Iguanas rafted more than 8,000 km from
North America to Fiji

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