Unlike mammals, it’s not hormones that dictate a chicken’s sex. It’s a fundamental property of the cells themselves. But this only became apparent when biologists investigated several odd chickens that were half male and half female, as if a line were drawn down the center of their bodies.
“We assumed this was caused by one side of the body having some kind of sex chromosome anomaly,” said Michael Clinton, a University of Edinburgh developmental biologist and co-author of the study, described March 10 in Nature. “But when we looked at them closely, they were composed of entirely normal cells. We realized that birds don’t follow the mammalian model.” ....
As cells on both sides of the body were exposed to the same hormones, it wasn’t hormones that mattered to gender, as with mammals. Gender was a fundamental property of the cells.
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