Twins at Conspicuously Different Developmental Stages in a Turtle Egg

One-egg twins, in general, initiate embryonic development at the same time, and their developmental stages proceed in parallel. Here we report a rare case of the embryonic development of the red-eared slider turtle, Trachemys scripta, in which twins at conspicuously different developmental stages developed on a single yolk. One of the twins appeared to have developed at the normal developmental rate, whereas the development of the other was markedly delayed, despite the absence of any overt anomalies. This observation suggests uncoupled or fully independent differential regulation of embryonic development from either a single or, more likely, two distinct pluripotent blastoderms sharing the same yolk and same environmental conditions.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Zoological Science

• Publication date

  2019-02-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2108/zs180107PMID 31116532
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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