Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

It's time again to look at where nature is stranger than fiction. Any fan of the Percy Jackson series, or honestly of mythology in general, should be aware of the Chimaera, or chimera. No, I don't mean the cartilagenous fish, although those are admittedly quite cool. I mean the mythical beast that according to the Greeks was the child of Typhon and Echidna (again, the monster, not the spiny marsupial). Usually the Chimera is shown with the body and head of a lion, a bizarre goat's head rising from the middle of its spine, and its tail may, or may not end in the head of a snake.

I get why the whole lion-snake combo scared the ancients, though I have to admit the goat head still puzzles me. After all, goats don't even have upper teeth, so biting isn't going to be very effective, and the only real attack they possess, the horn-enhanced head butt, isn't going to be all that dangerous from mid-spine. Still, the ancients thought it was terrifying, and that's what counts.

Want to get weirder? Chimeras are real. 

Not in the Lion-goat-snake love triangle way, thank the gods, but it does happen, and more often than you would think. Chimerism happens when two fertilized embryos combine, forming a single viable embryo. Those original cells, containing different DNA, then continue to divide so that the embryo will grow, forming various parts of its body. Depending on how far along those embryos were when they combined, and how different their genes were to begin with, the results can get pretty odd.

Documented cases of chimerism include labrador retrievers that are both black and yellow, cats that look like they were pieced together from pieces of different cats, (they were), and at least one human mother whose children aren't genetically all hers, because her ovaries and her body cells possess different DNA.

On a smaller scale, all genetic females have something similar going on inside them. Females, naturally, have two X chromosomes, one of which comes from the male parent and one from the female.  The body, however, can't cope with having two separate sets of instructions yelled at it constantly, so one of these chromosomes is always inactive. Funny thing, though, it shuts them down randomly (known in science as Random Inactivation of the X Chromosome, scientists have such catchy names for things). Just like the more extreme chimera, this leads to different body parts being governed by different sets of genes. In my case, it led to heterochromia, or different colored eyes. One eye is brown, and the other hazel green, a gift from the chaotic nature of the universe.

Cheers,

Michelle