New Scientist
Image: Bu Yousef
There’s more to songbird sex than we thought. It seems that all of them have an extra chromosome in their sex cells that isn’t seen elsewhere in their bodies. The extra DNA could help explain why songbirds account for roughly 5000 of the 10,000 known bird species.
Songbirds typically have 40 pairs of chromosomes in most cells of their body. But in the late 1990s, biologists studying zebra finches made an odd discovery. Some of the cells involved in sexual reproduction, called germline cells, carried an additional pair of chromosomes. Read more on newscientist.com…
