What has been the most successful animal ever?
Clive Tiney
Haxby, North Yorkshire, UK
Firstly, we need to define what we mean by successful.
Humans are probably the most successful at colonising the planet, but we haven’t been around for long when compared with the coelacanth, a type of fish that evolved more than 400 million years ago, or even monotremes, egg-laying mammals that arose around 200 million years ago. Such longevity might be a definition of success.
Brown rats have managed to colonise almost everywhere that humans have with very little effort, perhaps that is another definition. Of…
