FEMALE KOMODO DRAGON GIVES "VIRGIN" BIRTH !

The story of the Virgin Mary is what gives meaning to Christmas.


And now, Chester Zoo has a nativity story of its own - and a dragon's tale that promises to turn the traditional concepts of the birds and the bees on its head.

In a ground-breaking paper to be published in the scientific journal Nature next week, Chester Zoo has helped to prove that Komodo Dragons - the world's largest lizard - can reproduce in the absence of a male, parthenogenetically.


The key to this discovery lies with Flora - one of the zoo's two female Komodo Dragons - and began when Flora laid a clutch of 11 eggs in May this year.


The zoo's reptile keepers placed the eggs in an incubator. Three of the eggs collapsed but, once opened, were found to contain embryos - showing that they were fertile.


Fertile dragon's eggs are not in themselves unusual, but what made this news surprising was that virgin Flora has never been mixed with, or mated by, a male dragon. Scientists at Liverpool University under the guidance of Dr Phill Watts, carried out genetic fingerprinting on the three eggs and on the adult Komodo Dragons at the zoo. This ?'paternity' testing proved that Flora was indeed both the ?'mother' and the ?'father' of the fertile eggs.