It's a well-known fact that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes- 46 chromosomes in total. However, chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes, as do the other 'great apes'. Why is this? Well, it centres around human chromosome 2.

Sources for this episode:

Fullick A., Locke, J. and Bircher, P. (2015), A Level Biology for OCR A. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
IJdo, J.W., Baldini, A., Ward, D. C., Reeders S. T. and Wells, R. A. (1991) Origin of human chromosome 2: an ancestral telomere-telomere fusion, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 88(20): 9051-9055.
Willey, J. M., Sherwood, L. M. And Woolverton, C. J. (2017), Prescott’s Microbiology, 10th edition (International Edition). New York, McGraw-Hill Education.
Young, W. J., Merz, T., Ferguson-Smith, M. A. and Johnston, A. W. (1960), Chromosome Number of the Chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, Science 131(3414): 1672-1673.
Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Chimpanzee genome project (online) [Accessed 02/06/2021].
Author unknown, WWF (date unknown) Great apes (online) [Accessed 06/06/2021].

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