[marshray]

I think he's saying relatively modern chimps and pigs may have had a hybridization event.

Another argument was that the morphological distance, or genetic differences besides chromosome number, are just too great. Most of us are familiar with the platypus. A paper published in Nature a few years ago demonstrated that the platypus genome contains both bird and mammal chromosomes, and therefore that the vastly different bird and mammal sex chromosome systems have been successfully bridged by this creature. This example is not offered as any kind of proof. But it does suggest that sometime, long ago, a cross occurred that would have been even more distant than that between a chimpanzee and a pig – one between a otter-like mammal and a duck-like bird. And if such was the case, the hybrids from the cross must have been able to produce offspring (otherwise they would have died out, and the platypus would not exist today).

http://phys.org/news/2013-07-human-hybrids-closer-theory-evi...

[saalweachter]

No.

The platypus is not a bird/reptile hybrid. That is a wild misinterpretation of a genome study which happened a few years back.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/05/10/the-platypus-g...

[marshray]

<not sarcasm>Should I take from this that phys.org is not a particularly reliable source?</not sarcasm>

[saalweachter]

I am not particularly familiar with phys.org. Briefly scanning it, it looks pretty normal.

Most likely it's just someone stepping outside their wheelhouse. I mean, I trust PZ on biology, but I wouldn't incredulously accept legal advice from him. So, maybe reliable for physics/space, but unreliable for biology is my guess?