Marie is a landscape painter, and she looks for inspiration for her work when she travels. While in India, she decided to take a guided tour through the wilderness. During her tour, she saw Bengal tigers, one-horned rhinos, and the tallest grasses she had ever seen.

Some organisms have a large geographic range. for example, the norway rat lives on every continent except antarctica. a population of norway rats is the number of rats in one particular area. do you think it’s scientifically possible for a population of norway rats in north america to carry different genetic mutations than a population of norway rats in africa? do you think it’s possible that they carry some of the same mutations? what types of information can scientists learn by studying the genomes of these two populations of rats?