What’s particularly interesting about this two-headed pig is that it has two ears and two snouts, but three eyes (one shared in the middle). Unfortunately, a local veterinarian said that the animal is deformed and is unlikely to survive.
As Yahoo notes, this is not the first two-headed pig born in China. In 2001, Reuters reported that a Chinese farmer showed off a piglet born with two heads and three eyes in Zhaodun village in the province of Jiangsu.
How was the two-headed pig born?
The deformity of the two-headed pig may be the same condition called “axial bifurcation” that researchers determined was the cause of the two-headed bull shark in a study published this March in Journal of Fish Biology.
Axial bifurcation results when an embryo fails to split into two separate organisms, or twins, completely. It’s a very rare mutation that occurs in a number of animals, including humans.
“Halfway through the process of forming twins, the embryo stops dividing,” Michael Wagner, a researcher at Michigan State University, told LiveScience.
