About 65 years ago, at the National Cancer Institute (Bethesda, MD), a spontaneous mutation arose in a litter of inbred mice. Several of the offspring had abnormal skeletal features that included a short, kinky tail and an extra set of ribs in their neck vertebrae. Researchers at the time knew these ‘tail-short’ mutants could be important and continued to breed them, even though they lacked the technology to investigate the causes of the strange phenotype.
Lab Anim. (NY) 40, 168 (2011).
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