OrangeCoat

Platypus Genome Sequenced. More questions than answers.

My personal power-animal, the platypus, has finally had its genome sequenced. Of course we know the platypus is a chimeric combination of a unicorn and one of hell's duck-demons, but did you know:

The sex of the platypus is determined by a set of ten chromosomes, an oddity that sets it apart from all other mammals and from birds...“The sex chromosomes are absolutely, completely different from all other mammals. We had not expected that,” says Jennifer Graves of the Australian National University in Canberra, who studies sex differentiation and is an author on the paper. Instead, the platypus Xs better match the avian Z sex chromosome. Another chromosome matches the mouse X, Graves and her colleagues report

I might start calling shennannigans on Darwin for this one.

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