<div style="margin: 12px 0px; font-family: arial; color: #333333; background: #ffffff; border: solid 4px #e5e5e5; width: 100%; clear: left;"><div class="CM_CTB_Content_Wrap" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;background-color: #ffffff;"><div style="border-bottom: solid 1px #dcdcdc; white-space: nowrap; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: #eeeeee ;background-image: url(http://clipmarks.com/images/source-bg.gif); background-repeat: repeat-x; height: 24px; line-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle; padding-bottom: 4px; color: #666666; font-size: 10px;" ><a href="http://clipmarks.com/clip-to-blog/" title="see clips that are hot right now"><img src="http://content.clipmarks.com/blog_embed/ee7dfd17-8afb-49e9-88a2-7afecdac1edf/089AE434-A6E7-4A94-935D-AE0CDB8C519C/" alt="" width="19" height="19" border="0" style="vertical-align: middle; margin: 0px 4px; display: inline; border: none; float:none;" /></a>clipped from <a title="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/the_platypus_genome.php" href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/the_platypus_genome.php" style="font-size: 11px;">scienceblogs.com</a></div><blockquote style="text-align: left; padding: 0px 8px; margin: 4px 0px 8px 0px; background: transparent; border: none;" cite="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/the_platypus_genome.php">Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is "weird" or "odd" or worse, they imply that <A href="http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jpo2XUX22-9GvA0nItDWkpNMYCxA">the animal is a chimera</A> — "the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal". No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as birds are an independent and (directly) unrelated lineage; you can say it is part reptile, but that is because it is a member of a great reptilian clade that includes prototherians, marsupials, birds, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, and us eutherian mammals. We can say with equal justification that we are part reptile, too. </blockquote><div style="height: 2px; font-size: 2px; background: #dcdcdc; border-bottom: solid 1px #f5f5f5; margin: 2px 4px;"></div><blockquote style="text-align: left; padding: 0px 8px; margin: 4px 0px 8px 0px; background: transparent; border: none;" cite="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/the_platypus_genome.php">Now look at the cladogram. Birds (archosaurs) and lizards and snakes (lepidosaurs) exhibit meroblastic cleavage. Marsupials and eutherians divide holoblastically. To say that the platypus is part bird because of that is misleading; what we'd say instead is that meroblastic cleavage is likely to be a <B>primitive</B> character</blockquote></div><div style="margin: 0px 6px 6px 4px;"><table style="font-size: 11px;border-spacing: 0px;padding: 0px;" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tr><td style="background:transparent;border-width:0px;padding:0px;">&nbsp;</td><td align="right" style="background:transparent;border-width:0px;padding:0px;width:107px" width="107"><a href="http://clipmarks.com/share/089AE434-A6E7-4A94-935D-AE0CDB8C519C/blog/" title="blog or email this clip"><img src="http://content7.clipmarks.com/images/c2b-foot.png" border="0" alt="blog it" width="107" height="17" style="border-width:0px;padding:0px;margin:0px;" /></a></td></tr></table></div></div>

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