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Here’s one for your nightmares. Biologists at the University of Málaga in Spain have discovered a shark embryo with two heads.
The biologists were sorting through hundreds of Atlantic sawtail catshark embryos for a study on how the sharks’ cardiovascular system develops, when they spotted the creature growing inside a translucent egg.
“Each head had a mouth, two eyes, a brain, a notochord [like a spinal cord] and five gill openings on each side,” the authors write in the latest issue of the Journal of Fish Biology.Behind the gills, the two heads fused into a single body, inside which “were two hearts, two oesophaguses, two stomachs, two livers.” (The creature shared an intestine and one set of kidneys and reproductive organs.)
This is the first time a two-headed conjoined twin has ever been recorded in an egg-laying shark, the report states.
Previously, scientists have found conjoined sharks in species that give birth to live animals. And even in those cases, it has been exceedingly rare: Only seven other similarly fused two-headed shark specimens appear in the scientific literature, they note. (A very few two-headed sharks have been found in the wild. Click if you dare.)
Read more here. (Vox)
The biologists were sorting through hundreds of Atlantic sawtail catshark embryos for a study on how the sharks’ cardiovascular system develops, when they spotted the creature growing inside a translucent egg.
“Each head had a mouth, two eyes, a brain, a notochord [like a spinal cord] and five gill openings on each side,” the authors write in the latest issue of the Journal of Fish Biology.Behind the gills, the two heads fused into a single body, inside which “were two hearts, two oesophaguses, two stomachs, two livers.” (The creature shared an intestine and one set of kidneys and reproductive organs.)
This is the first time a two-headed conjoined twin has ever been recorded in an egg-laying shark, the report states.
Previously, scientists have found conjoined sharks in species that give birth to live animals. And even in those cases, it has been exceedingly rare: Only seven other similarly fused two-headed shark specimens appear in the scientific literature, they note. (A very few two-headed sharks have been found in the wild. Click if you dare.)
Read more here. (Vox)
