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Adaptive radiation

The process by which a single ancestral lineage fans out rapidly into many descendant forms, each adapted to a different empty niche - usually when life meets a world full of open jobs: a new island, a cleared landscape, a young biosphere. Darwin's finches on the Galápagos, Hawaii's honeycreepers, and the Caribbean's Anolis lizards all did it. Pandora's entire bestiary can be read as one enormous adaptive radiation off the moon's foundational six-limbed body plan.