Tram Town
Thursday, March 08, 2007
| Category: Words I was looking up coelacanth over at the (sadly) much maligned Wikipedia and discovered that it is ovoviviparous. We humans (and most mammals) are viviparous and birds and monotremes are oviparous. The issue is where the embryo develops. Ovo means in an egg. Viv means live birth. Ovoviviparous means that the embryo develops inside the egg, inside the uterus and comes into the world as an "autonomous" beings. I might say that I felt a bit revulted when I read about the notion of intrauterine cannibalism. It seems that some sharks have two uteruses; one in which the embryo develops within the egg and one in which the multiple offspring eat each other until the final two are allowed to "exit". |
