It’s official: the animal with the highest number of chromosomes is the Atlas blue butterfly, boasting a record 229 pairs. This is a pretty unusual finding since many of its closest relatives have just 23 or 24 pairs. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The Atlas blue butterfly ( Polyommatus atlantica ) is native to the North African mountain ranges of Morocco and northeast Algeria.

It had long been suspected that this elusive butterfly may hold the record for the most chromosome pairs in the animal kingdom, but scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona have now sequenced its genome for the first time, confirming the claim.

Chromosomes are thread-like structure

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