This Python named Thelma is eleven years old, she miraculously produced six female offspring in June 2012 at Louisville Zoo in Kentucky – despite no male being anywhere near her (91kg).
Scientist went ahead to carry out a study, leading to a new DNA evidence published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, which suggests that the six-foot snake is the sole parent of the first ever recorded virgin birth in reticulated pythons.
Thelma weighs 91kg and is six feet long
‘We didn’t know what we were seeing. We had attributed it to stored sperm,’ the zoo’s curator of cold-blooded animals, Bill McMahan, told National Geographic.
‘I guess sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.’
What are Virgin Births?
This is called parthenogenesis, it’s a condition where animal’s egg that should normally die start behaving like sperm and fuse with an egg to produce offspring’s.
It is common to birds, sharks and boa constrictors and a few other animals. Why this happened to Thelma continues to delude researchers.
