In 2006, a study published in the journal Biology Letters described a fossil unlike any ever seen before. It captured a prehistoric reptile that lived around 125 million years ago. That, in itself, wasn’t terribly surprising, but the fact that it had two heads really, really was. Bicephalism describes a quirk in animal development that results in an individual with …
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A fossil unearthed two decades ago in northeastern China has captured renewed scientific attention this summer after researchers confirmed it as the oldest known case of polycephaly—a congenital condition where an animal is born with more than one head. Published in the journal Biology Letters by the Royal Society in 2006, and recently revisited in several scientific outlets, the fossil …
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A recently re-examined fossil from Brazil has revealed one of the rarest phenomena ever recorded in prehistoric life: a two-headed reptile dating back to the Early Cretaceous period, roughly 120 million years ago. The discovery, detailed in a peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The fossil preserves an incredibly rare case of bicephaly, a condition …
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Rare malformations can cause animals to grow two heads – and it seems that kind of thing has been happening for millions of years. In 2006, paleontologists in China described a two-headed fossil from the age of dinosaurs. Hyphalosaurus is a small, aquatic reptile that lived more than 120 million years ago, and is known from thousands of fossils. But …
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Rare malformations can cause animals to grow two heads – and it seems that kind of thing has been happening for millions of years. In 2006, paleontologists in China described a two-headed fossil from the age of dinosaurs. Hyphalosaurus is a small, aquatic reptile that lived more than 120 million years ago, and is known from thousands of fossils. But …
Read More »