A lizard Christ-child?
Flora (below), is a Komodo dragon living at the Chester Zoo in England. She was pregnant and her eggs are expected to hatch into 8 baby dragon lizards around Christmas.
What makes her story interesting is that she’s never had the pleasure of socializing with any male Komodo dragons. Apparently some other lizards are known to be able to reproduce via self-fertilization, but the Komodo’s ability to do this is a new discovery, which makes them the largest species able to do this.
“The scientists, reporting the discovery in the science journal Nature, said it could help them understand how reptiles colonize new areas.
A female dragon could, for instance, swim to another island and establish a new colony on her own.
“The genetics of self-fertilization in lizards means that all her hatchlings would have to be male. These would grow up to mate with their own mother and therefore, within one generation, there would potentially be a population able to reproduce normally on the new island,”.”
December 21st, 2006 at 7:57 am
Very weird
January 24th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
[...] Remember my post last month about Flora, the komodo dragon in England who was reproducing without a male counterpart? [...]