distinct species.

But when I went to western Australia, I found a species that combined the characters of
X and Y.’

It would be like seeing a fluffy-tailed creature with black-and-white stripes down its back eating acorns
in your backyard. Are you looking at a squirrel or a skunk? Should you step away in alarm or simply wait
for it to scamper away?

‘I thought, “Good grief, I made a mistake”,’ Veron told me. ‘So I went back to the Great Barrier Reef. And
there was no mistake.’

But when Veron went to the Philippines and Japan, the confusion returned. The further Veron travelled
from Australia, the more his confidence in identifying coral species wavered. What was going on?

One morning in 1993, while waiting for his kettle to boil, a solution to all his bothersome questions
arrived. ‘The whole concept of reticulate evolution literally came into my head almost instantaneously. It
really did; the whole lot from beginning to end … we call them eureka moments.’

The hypothesis of reticulate evolution is that species are not as isolated from each other as Haeckel’s
branching trees propose. Instead, species both diverge and merge together. The tree of life doesn’t look
like a tree so much as the reticulated pattern of a python’s skin.