It Was Only A Couple Of Months Ago,

that I made a post,

about the Platypus, November 2020 as it happens, in the post I mentioned that 'they have parts of quiet a few other animals making them up, the duck (bill and webbed feet), beaver (tail), and otter (body and fur), males are also venomous. They have sharp stingers on the heels of their rear feet and can use them to deliver a strong toxic blow to any foe, they lay eggs, but are mammals and suckle their young, but not through nipples, the mothers do not have them, the milk is delivered through the mothers skin', but now new research has gone one level further when you look at them at a molecular level, they are even weirder, scientists have recently managed to sequence a male platypus’s DNA, and found some surprising things, the authors were particularly interested in the animal's sex chromosomes, which appear to have originated independently from other therian mammals, all of which contain a simple XY pair, from the article, 'the platypus, however, is the only known animal with 10 sex chromosomes (echidnas have nine). Platypus have 5X and 5Y chromosomes organised in a ring that appears to have broken apart into pieces over the course of mammalian evolution, comparing this chromosome information to humans, opossums, Tasmanian devils, chickens, and lizard genomes, the authors found the platypus's sex chromosomes have more in common with birds like chickens than mammals such as humans', what an amazing animal the platypus really is.