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Fingerprints

Krash

Scholar
Krash
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
66
I just cracked a Snapple® (not a routine occurrence for me) and noticed a message on the underside of the lid. I was presented with the opportunity to possibly learn something while I quenched my thirst. A credulous factoid (#130 in a series of 200-and-something) which states:

"Koalas and humans are the only animals with unique fingerprints."

For some reason, I can't take this at face value. I instantly thought about apes and other primates, all of which possess grasping appendages. It seems extremely unlikely for the dermal rides of any two biological specimens to be completely identical. Of course, certainly no laws of nature prevent this either.

I read about (and am bothered by) dubious things like this so often that I've become quite good at doing a couple quick searches and finding some information that confirms my suspicions. But that has not been the case here. Does anyone know about apes and their fingerprints?

I think it's time to switch to beer. Beer doesn't tend do this to me.
 
What I learnt recently was that Koala and human fingerprints are virtually indistinguishable - perhaps that what the factoid is supposed to say.

However, many creatures have "fingerprints" of a sort, and not just monkees and apes apparently...

"That surfaces of palms, soles, digits, and sometimes prehensile tails, of primates are covered with papillary ridges organized into complex “dermatoglyphic” patterns is well known. Dermal ridges also occur sporadically in non-primate mammalian species (Okajima, 1991). The printable patterns of dermal ridges form during the intra-uterine life, and are known to be highly heritable (Loesch and Przybyla, 1988)."

Source - http://www.xs4all.nl/~dacty/newpage12.htm - this also contains an interesting section on comparison between Koala and Human fingerprints. I think this will be a better source of information than your Snapple bottle top ;)
 
I concur with brettDbass... I heard the same fact on an episode of QI recently.

What's possibly more interesting is that the received wisdom that no two humans have identical fingerprints is not particularly well-established. Certainly, it seems to be the case that fingerprint matching is significantly less than perfect... however, I read in New Scientist that some jurisdictions that require any forensic science method to have a known error rate actually exclude fingerprinting, purely for historical reasons - ie fingerprinting has been considered to be infallible for so long that we cannot now admit that it isn't without causing judicial chaos.

See Google for more: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=fingerprinting+fallibility
 
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