A Bilateral Gynandromorph
The world is crazy. The cardinal pictured above is a bilateral gynandromorph, which means it has both male and female sex chromosomes. This is the bird equivalent of a hermaphrodite. Not only is this bird’s coloration divided, but if we were to open it up we would find an ovary on the right and a testis on the left.
Here’s the blog entry which first brought this phenomenon to my attention; here’s an article describing it in more detail (skip to page #15).
This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under animals, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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