In January 2018, a female crocodile in a Costa Rican zoo laid a clutch of eggs. That was peculiar: She’d been living alone for 16 years. Scientists discover a virgin birth in a crocodile:
A parthenogenetic egg is illuminated in a process called candling to determine if the egg is fertile. In crocodiles, a fertile egg shows the band; infertile eggs simply candle yellow because of the presence of yolk only.
While crocodiles can lay sterile eggs that don’t develop, some of this clutch looked quite normal. And one of them — in a plot twist familiar to anyone who has watched “Jurassic Park” — continued to mature in an incubator. In this case, the egg eventually yielded a perfectly formed but stillborn baby crocodile.a team of researchers report that the baby crocodile was a parthenogen — the product of a virgin birth, containing only genetic material from its mother.
“What this tells us is it’s very likely that this also happened in pterosaurs and dinosaurs,” Booth said.
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