This is fun, its about time they started in with the interesting creatures.. I mean who wants the genome of a fruit fly anyway(sic)!?!
I certainly would have raised one of these in space!
At first dismissed as a prank, and later cited as proof that God has a sense of humour, the duck-billed platypus has finally given up its evolutionary secrets.
…and talk about Kinky!
The fact that the animal has five X and five Y chromosomes is “the weirdest thing about a very weird animal,” said Ewan Birney, a co-author on the paper, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute, near Cambridge. “In theory it means there are 25 possible sexes, though in practice that doesn’t happen.”
Quoted from guardian.co.uk
PZ Myers (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/the_platypus_genome.php) had a good retort to this “weirdness” comment that appeared in a number of newspapers:
Every organism is going to be a mix of conserved, primitive characters and evolutionary novelties — a mouse is just as “weird” as a platypus from an evolutionary perspective, since each is the product of processes that promote divergence from a common ancestor, and each are equidistant from that ancestor. It’s just that we primates share more derived characters with a mouse than with a platypus, because we are more closely related, and the mix of characters in the mouse are more familiar to us.
Sounds good to me, I like that guys logic, I kinda avoided the chimera bits in my quotation because is seemed like a bit of a stretch. 10 Sex chromosomes though, it is neat to see that the platypus keeps getting ‘subjectively’ stranger.