A sports teacher found a dead two-headed dolphin lying on the beach of Izmir district in Turkey on Monday, based on reports gathered.
Turgul Metin, 29, said he didn’t know to how to react at first to the rare creature, thinking his eyes must have been playing tricks on him. Later on, he called the local authorities to address the strange discovery.
“I've never even heard about a dolphin like this let alone seen one with my own eyes - I was completely shocked,” Metin said.
The rare dolphin, sharing just one tail, was estimated to be about one year old and measuring 3.2 feet in length. It was also observed that its eyes and blowholes on one of the heads were not opened properly, gathered reports said.
Marine biologist Mehmet Gokoglu from Akdeniz University, who will study the corpse of the dolphin, called the conjoined dolphin as an extremely rare occurrence that is similar to occurrence of conjoined human twins.
Recall that a fisherman also found a two-headed bull shark sometime in April 2011 on the Gulf of Mexico, according to previous reports. He said to have found the two-headed baby after cutting into the uterus of the adult shark.
In March 2013 the Michigan State University experts confirmed in a study that the shark was indeed a single shark but with two heads, not conjoined as others assumed.
"This is certainly one of those interesting and rarely detected phenomena," fisheries and wildlife professor Michael Wagner of said university was quoted saying. "It's good that we have this documented as part of the world's natural history."
Wagner and his group made use of MRIs to examine and show the shark with two distinctive heads, stomachs and hearts, while the remainder of the shark’s body merged together at the back, creating a single tail.
Wagner said that people might see many other cases of two-headed snakes and lizards because these are usually bred in captivity, with the animal breeders more likely to observe such abnormalities.
In January, twin gray whales—believed to be the first sighting of its kind—were reported to have been discovered at Ojo de Liebre or Scammon’s Lagoon in Mexico. The Latin Post, however, revealed that they didn’t find any record of such abnormality in animals whether through its online search or an inquiry at the National History Museum of Los Angeles.
