>>13804659Not OP but playing devil's advocate: how can a species, A, with a certain number of chromosomes evolve into a different kind of species, B, that has a different number of chromosomes?
Naiive intuition would hold that for this to happen, two parents of species A would have to have one or more offspring that have the chromosome count of species B through some mutative process, and these B offspring would have to breed with each other - which surely introduces a problem with genetic bottlenecking and, coupled with a low breeding population, that makes speciation from A to B unlikely to be successful.
Have we ever observed an animal having offspring with a different number of chromosomes to itself, and those offspring either successfully maintaining their population as a new, reproductively-isolated species from that of their parents, or does naiive intuition fail here and actually a different number of chromosomes is less fundamentally problematic than high school biology would imply?
