In message , Nick Maclaren
writes

In article ,
Stewart Robert Hinsley writes:
|
| I was aware of the case of male apomixis in Cupressus dupreziana, but it
| appears to even weirder than I knew. According to this article in
| Arnoldia if you fertilise Cupressus sempervirens with C. dupreziana
| pollen what you get is seed of C. dupreziana pollen.
|
| http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.ed...ticles/636.pdf

Thank you. I am suitably boggled. That could develop into a most
interesting and potentially invasive form of parasitism - a sort of
embryonic cuckoo's approach - don't tell Monsanto :-)

| But then vertebrates are also weird - see Rana esculenta.

Indeed. I am half-expecting someone to find an oddity among even
the mammals one of these days.

Does the existence of 5 pairs of sex chromosomes in the platypus
qualify? (However the existence of more than one pair also occurs in
some lizards, some amphibians and some fish.) It seems about as weird as
permanent translocation heterozygosity in some Onagraceae (classically
in Oenothera section Oenothera) and permanent odd polyploidy as in the
dog roses.

Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

--
Stewart Robert Hinsley