Scary: 5 Animals With the Horrifying Diprosopus Condition (Video and Photos Included!!!)

in #animals7 years ago (edited)

Warning: You May Want To Avoid Reading This Post on a Full Stomach. 


Greetings steemians! In the past week I have bombarded you with various strange and unique animals. Today, I have for you something different, a scary and very rare congenital disease! The name of this disease is "Diprosopus". 

Diprosopus is a greek-derived term that translates to "the one with two faces". Also known as craniofacial duplication, it is an extremely rare congenital disorder whereby part or all of the face are duplicated on the head. [1] The disease is not to be confused with Polycephaly (condition of having more than one head) which I will probably cover in a future post!

In animals, most babies with diprosopus are stillborn and the ones that survive birth usually die in a matter of minutes or hours. The same is true for humans. In case you are interested, there are two reported cases, in 2002 and 2003, of two male infants born with partial diprosopus. Check the references [2,3] if you want to learn more about these two cases.

Don't worry, I am not here to horrify you with photos of poor human babies born with the disease! But sharing photos and videos from animals with diprosopus? Well, I feel ok with that!

So, here are a few animal cases with the condition:

Case 1. "Frank and Louie"

The first case I want to talk about is a cat, called Frank and Louie, also known as FrankenLouie (I wonder why!). The cat was born in 1999 and died in the ripe age of 15 from cancer. Here are two videos of him, he (they?) is quite cute, isn't he?

Case 2. Chick with two beaks and three eyes

This is an image I found over wikipedia. Unfortunately, I couldn't dig up any background info other than the photo's description which reads: "A malformed chick with two beaks and three eyes from the collections of the Zoological Museum of the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland."

Case 3. Two-faced Piglet from China

This is a two-face piglet born in China, sometime in 2007. The pig was bred by pig farmer Liu Shuping, from Shannxi province in the north west of China. It had two mouths, two noses, and three eyes. [4]

Case 4. Two-faced cow

 This cow had three sets of teeth, two lower jaws, two noses, two tongues and one mouth. Each nose came with its own airway. Interestingly, there was only one eye socket, whith two eyes inside! The creature was bred by Farmer Kirk Heldreth, of Rural Retreat in Virginia, who back then commented: ‘It’s as healthy as can be.’ 2007

Case 5. Another kitten with two faces

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC52X5wxOL_s5yw0dQk7NtgA

Well, just another kitten born with two faces. Unfortunately, unlike FrankenLouie, this one died soon after. 

Epilogue

When I started writing this post I was hoping to find more material to post here (mainly photos & videos) but unfortunately that's pretty much all I could dig. Feel free to leave a comment if you find any photos or videos that I have missed!

See ya tomorrow, when I will be back with a new strange animal :)

References

  1. Wikipedia: Diprosopus
  2. Craniofacial Duplication (Diprosopus): CT, MR Imaging, and MR Angiography Findings
  3. Diprosopus: a unique case and review of the literature.
  4. Oh dear, it’s another two-headed pig
  5. You are such a two-faced cow


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More Strange Animals To Come 
I will be posting one new strange animal each and every day so if you enjoyed this post make sure to follow me and let's discover together some of the world's most strange and bizarre creatures! An upvote and resteem would be nice too :P In the meantime, you may want to check out this snake-lizard-worm-like thing, learn how many legs the world's leggiest creature has and discover the world's largest one-cell organism!   

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Pretty weird but rather cool images. This two headed snake would fit right in!

Well that would fall under polycephally which is two heads :) Diprosopus is one head with two faces. Thanks for the comment though. I will certainly include this one in a future post! :D

Ahh that makes sense!

I guess the Romans's two-faced god Janus would be their protector...
Poor creatures!

Great post @trumpman!!

It's weird... I was browsing posts on #comics and found an essay about super-villains, mentioning among others Two-Face from Batman. That guy had a split personality, and his costume and face make-up was also split in two halves! Just then, I saw this post... is it the Double-Face-Day today?!?

Anyway... sorry, I can't say they are cute, but certainly it was a very interesting read, as usual.

Apparently it is! Thanks for the comment and stay tuned if you enjoyed it :*

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