Telegony (pregnancy)
Telegony is a theory in heredity, holding that offspring can inherit the characteristics of a previous mate of the female parent; thus the child of a widowed or remarried woman might partake of traits of a previous husband.
Whereas experiments in the late 19th century on several species failed to provide evidence that offspring would inherit any character from their mother's previous mates, a similar phenomenon whereby environmental (non-genetic) traits were passed has been recently discovered in a species of fly.