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ek slash special offer. This is Scientific American 60 second science I'm

Christopher and Tagata. It sounds like a witch's recipe.

Gather the hearts of a fence lizard, a little brown bat, a naked-tailed

armadillo, and dozens of others. So initially we try to get them from zoo but unfortunately we that didn't work out very well

We couldn't get any samples even when the animal died we couldn't get a heart

Guo Huang a developmental biologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

He says they had more success obtaining specimens from the jars of natural history museums.

But the reason for this biological scavenger hunt,

Huang and his colleagues wanted to examine the number of chromosomes contained in heart cells across the animal kingdom.

Because there's a curious phenomenon in our hearts, which is that most of the human body's cells are diploid,

meaning two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent, but the lion's share of our heart cells are actually polyploid,

meaning two or more copies from mom, two or more

copies from dad.

...