The weirdest type of lizard I’ve found is the three-toed skink. It only has little legs, so it looks a bit like a snake from far away. It lives most of it’s life underground and only comes up to the surface to feed and catch insects at night.
This lizard is also weird because it can either lay eggs or give birth to live young, depending on where it lives. Three-toed skinks from Sydney lay eggs, while the same type of lizard from Armidale in NSW gives birth to live young. Weird!
It gets even weirder… When I was looking at the DNA of this lizard, I found a cancer protein in it’s uterus when it gets pregnant. WTF?! This didn’t mean the lizards had cancer though – they were perfectly healthy. I think it meant that cancer might have evolved at the same time as live birth evolved in lizards and in mammals like us humans.
Maybe we humans would never get cancer if we hadn’t evolved to give birth to live young – but it would be weird I guess if we were still laying eggs. Then you’d see more women that look like I do in my profile picture!
The weirdest type of lizard I’ve found is the three-toed skink. It only has little legs, so it looks a bit like a snake from far away. It lives most of it’s life underground and only comes up to the surface to feed and catch insects at night.
This lizard is also weird because it can either lay eggs or give birth to live young, depending on where it lives. Three-toed skinks from Sydney lay eggs, while the same type of lizard from Armidale in NSW gives birth to live young. Weird!
It gets even weirder… When I was looking at the DNA of this lizard, I found a cancer protein in it’s uterus when it gets pregnant. WTF?! This didn’t mean the lizards had cancer though – they were perfectly healthy. I think it meant that cancer might have evolved at the same time as live birth evolved in lizards and in mammals like us humans.
Maybe we humans would never get cancer if we hadn’t evolved to give birth to live young – but it would be weird I guess if we were still laying eggs. Then you’d see more women that look like I do in my profile picture!
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