In a truly double-take-inducing finding, geneticists recently surveyed a population of critically endangered California condors and found that two of the birds reproduced without actually mating.
This phenomenon, called parthenogenesis (a nice callback to Athena springing from Zeus’s head), happens occasionally in reptiles and fishes but rarely in birds. The scientists stumbled across the discovery when going back through the genetic records of the condors from the mid-2000s. Their findings were published today in the Journal of Heredity.
“It’s a remarkably improbable occurrence,” said Oliver Ryder, a geneticist at the Wildlife Alliance at the San Diego Zoo and co-lead author of the paper, in a phone call with Gizmodo. “In their lifetimes they weren’t even recognized to be parthenotes… we’re definitely keeping our eyes out anytime we get a batch of blood samples for testing…”