“…Although mature animals display a wide interspecies variability to the acute toxic effects of TCDD, demonstrated by the 5000-fold difference in the acute LD 50 among species, evidence suggests that the developing embryo and fetus are uniquely sensitive to TCDD (McNulty, 1984;Olson et al, 1990;Peterson et al, 1993). There has been frequent use of the rat Gray et al, 1997;Huuskonen et al, 1994;Ikeda et al, 2005;Mably et al, 1992a,b,c) and mouse (Birnbaum et al, 1991;Ko et al, 2002;Neubert et al, 1973;Thackaberry et al, 2005;Weber and Birnbaum, 1985;Willey et al, 1998) as model systems to study the developmental toxicity of TCDD. However, only a few studies have utilized the hamster Olson and McGarrigle, 1992;Olson et al, 1990;Wolf et al, 1999) or guinea pig (Olson and McGarrigle, 1992).…”