The two headed shark caught by a fisherman in the United States. Picture: Live Science.
AS if catching a shark wasn't exciting enough, this fisherman found one of the shark's live foetuses had two heads.
The fisherman handed the specimen, caught off the Florida Keys over to scientists who published a report on the creature in the Journal of Fish Biology this week.
MRI scans of the animal showed it really was two headed. It had two distinct brains as well as two hearts and two stomachs. The rest of the body was joined by one single tail.
The deformation is called "axial bifurcation". It occurs when the embryo begins to split into two separate animals or twins, but doing so incompletely.
It turns out the shark is one of only six examples of a two-headed shark ever recorded, and the first time this has been seen in a bull shark.
Michael Wagner, the study co-author and researcher at Michigan State University told Discovery.com the animal wouldn't have lived for long in the wild.
"It had very developed heads, but a very stunted body," Prof Wagner said." When you're a predator that needs to move fast to catch other fast-moving fish … that'd be nearly impossible with this mutation."
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