In January 2018, a female crocodile in a Costa Rican zoo laid a clutch of eggs.
While crocodiles can lay sterile eggs that don’t develop, some of this clutch looked quite normal.
In this case, life did not, uh, find a way, as the egg eventually yielded a perfectly formed but stillborn baby crocodile.
In a paper out Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, a team of researchers report that the baby crocodile was a parthenogen — the product of a virgin birth, containing only genetic material from its mother.
Here’s how a virgin birth happens: As an egg cell matures in its mother’s body, it divides repeatedly to generate a final product with exactly half the genes needed for an individual.
Persons:
” —, parthenogenesis
Organizations:
cobras, California condors
Locations:
Costa Rican, sawfish