One of the Komodo dragons, called Flora, is a resident of Chester Zoo in Britain and she is awaiting her clutch of eight eggs to hatch, with a due-date estimated around Christmas.
Flora, who has never been kept with a male Komodo dragon, laid 11 eggs earlier this year. Three eggs died, providing the material needed for genetic tests, which revealed the offspring wouldn’t be clones of their mother, although their genetic make-up was taken just from her.
Another captive-bred female Komodo dragon called Sungai, at London Zoo, produced four baby dragons earlier this year - more than two years after her last contact with a male, the scientists also reported.
Richard Gibson, a curator at the Zoological Society of London, said: "Parthenogenesis has been described before in about 70 species of vertebrates, but it has always been regarded to be a very unusual, perhaps abnormal phenomenon," and he added that it has been shown in some snakes, fish, a monitor lizard and even a turkey.
