@Betty https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2413164/ claims that all platypi are either xx*5 or xy*5 rather than there being like, as many options as you would expect from “ten sex chromosomes”

and also, some of their sex chromosomes look like the ones in birds, which is WILD

@Satsuma what are you doing with all those chromosomes!? This is potato shit!

@Satsuma I like how this paper keeps citing this one guy, and his to-date fruitless efforts to figure out wtf is up with platypi. Him and his team just shaking platypi in the lab, yelling "tell us your testicle secrets!"

@Betty we will never know the ineffable secrets of the platypussy

@Satsuma okay but have the looked into the secrets of the echidnapussy? Is it similar?

Because I don't know what would be weirder, if it has eighteen chromosomes, or if it has two.

@Satsuma "The male short-beaked echidna has 63 chromosomes and the female 64" so, all normal stuff.

https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2007-8-11-r243

@Betty i was just about to quote this same paper 😂
«Chromosome painting reveals a meiotic chain of nine sex chromosomes in the male echidna and establishes their order in the chain. Two of those differ from those in the platypus, three of the platypus sex chromosomes differ from those of the echidna and the order of several chromosomes is rearranged.»
the fact that they have similar numbers of chromosomes but several of them are unique to either the platypus of the echidna is wild imo

@Satsuma biology is such a kludge.

@Betty truly just ductape and “eh it’ll work for now i guess” all the way down