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charon writes:

A few years ago, Christopher Hamm was reading up on monarch butterflies when he noticed something peculiar. All of the scientific articles that mentioned the number of the insect's chromosomes—30, it seemed—referenced a 2004 paper, which in turn cited a 1975 paper. But when Hamm, then a postdoc at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, did a genetic analysis of his own, he found that his monarchs only had 28 chromosomes, suggesting that an error has pervaded the literature for more than 40 years. Another twist, however, was just around the corner.

Hamm suspected a mistake when he read the original 1975 paper. The authors, biologists N. Nageswara Rao and A. S. Murty at Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India, had studied what they claimed was an Indian monarch butterfly in their work. But there's a problem: Monarchs are nearly exclusively a North American species. "It's implied they just went outside their building and collected some butterflies," Hamm says. "I immediately thought, 'Monarch butterflies in India? Really?'"

[...] Case closed, right? Not quite. A paper published a few days later on bioRxiv by some of Hamm's former colleagues at the University of Kansas claims to have found, like Rao and Murty, 30 chromosomes in monarchs. "Previously, an observation of N=30 chromosomes was reported only for males (Nageswara-Rao and Murty 1975)," the authors write. "Our current analysis confirms the same chromosome number not only in males but also in females." The authors of that paper declined to comment on Hamm's findings.

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