This brings us to the most wonderful part of the Fruit Fly’s Tale. After they had been discovered in Drosophila, Hox genes started turning up all over the place: not only in other insects such as beetles, but in almost all other animals that have been looked at, including ourselves. And—this really is almost too good to be true—they very often turn out to be doing the same kind of thing, even down to informing cells which segment they are in and (better still) being arrayed in the same order along chromosomes. Let’s now turn to the mammal story, which has been most thoroughly worked out in the
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