… platypuses (platypi?) don’t just look weird, they really are weird.
In the international Nature journal today they report a platypus has five chromosomes determining sex, not one – like the rest of the species in the world.
Professor Jennifer Graves says platypus have five X and five Y chromosomes, and when sperm are made it gets even stranger. “What we’ve discovered is that these five Xs and five Ys line up in a great big long chain, that go XY XY XY XY XY XY, and then all the X chromosomes move to one pole, and all the Y chromosomes move to the other,” she said.
(via Uncle Bear)
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