A recent article in the Washington Post describes how a contagious cancer, which causes facial tumors, has ravaged wild populations of Tasmanian devils -- Populations have declined by ~80% in the last 20 years! Genetic diversity in Tasmanian devils is generally low (which probably made them immunologically vulnerable to begin with), but in populations that persist researchers found genomic regions containing immune-function genes that have undergone recent selection. Thus population genomics shows evidence of recent evolution in these wild devils.The original research paper published in Nature Communications can be found HERE.
