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What Went Wrong at Jurassic Park? Modes of Sex Determination and Adaptive Sex Allocation in Reptiles

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Choosing Sexes

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Abstract

While birds and mammals determine sex of offspring via sex chromosomes, reptiles developed a new way to determine offspring sex—through temperature. We now know that reptiles display a range of sex-determining systems, including systems that show strict genetic sex determination, systems that have genetic sex determination with a temperature override, and finally systems in which temperature determines sex with no apparent genetic underpinning. In this chapter, I will outline the many different modes of sex determination found in reptiles and discuss the evidence for adaptive sex allocation in reptilian systems.

There is no unauthorized breeding at Jurassic Park…because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We’ve engineered them that way

Dr. Henry Wu, Chief Geneticist at Jurassic Park

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  1. Department of Poultry Science, The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

    Kristen J. Navara

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Navara, K.J. (2018). What Went Wrong at Jurassic Park? Modes of Sex Determination and Adaptive Sex Allocation in Reptiles. In: Choosing Sexes. Fascinating Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71271-0_8

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