Posted on 02/28/2019 4:04:42 PM PST by EveningStar
Boy and girl, now four, are only the second case of ‘sesquizygotic’ twins recorded
A pair of twins have stunned researchers after it emerged that they are neither identical nor fraternal – but something in between.
The team say the boy and girl, now four years old, are the second case of semi-identical twins ever recorded, and the first to be spotted while the mother was pregnant.
The situation was a surprise to the researchers. An ultrasound of the 28-year old mother at six weeks suggested the twins were identical – with signs including a shared placenta. But it soon became clear all was not as it seemed.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Is it a Feminazi scientist?
That’s a good question. Perhaps with hormone supplementation? She could not have biological children, but lots of people have meaningful lives despite much worse disabilities.
It seems as though this situation has both children close to an intersex condition, if not visibly showing characteristics of both sexes.
If you REALLY want to learn something, read the article!
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Hey Dufus, haven’t heard from you for awhile. I did read the article. I didn’t think to put IBTG, as you are used to seeing.
Two heartbeats in one amniotic sack is 99.9999999% identical twins.
I read someplace that when cows twin, both the calves are damaged genetically.
It doesn’t seem as if that’s generally true.
A quick search on the subject says that a female twin with a male twin is likely be infertile. That’s called a “freemartin.” Also, a cow may reject one twin. However, the value to a farmer makes hand-rearing the second twin or placing it with another cow a financial win.
I remember a set of twins in my Jr high school, one boy and one girl. They were similar in appearance, same height, facial features, body shape, etc. Apparently identical but for their sex. That was 65 years ago.
Multiple fathers?
I remember reading of a similar case, in the newspapers, fifty years ago. the kicker was one twin was white, one was black. The newspapers had a field day speculating how many men she had “had” the day she became pregnant.
Never heard another word about it.
It’s more likely that either the mother or the father was mixed-race.
Two heartbeats in one amniotic sack is 99.9999999% identical twins.
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Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s right. And for NORMAL identical twins, that’s not a problem. Cells from a pregnant woman can make their way through the placenta to an unborn child and cells from the unborn child make their way to the mother. That can sometimes/rarely make for future problems.
Identical twins (in the same sac as you point out) also can exchange these microchimeric cells through their shared placenta. Since they are identical twins with cells genetically different, that should never cause a problem. Since these half identical twins also share the same placenta they also “exchange” cells and thus become somewhat chimeric (have some cells with the slightly different genetic materiel from their half identical twin). I suspect that fetal exchange is how they ACTUALLY became chimeric instead of the convoluted attempt at explanation in the article.
The funny thing is that if the half identical twins had both been the same sex, they would have been far less likely to have the developmental problems they had/will have as a result of being different sexes (but having chimeric cells of a different sex).
Jamaican father.
“Wow, I didn’t know that an unfertized human egg could split into two before it was fertilized. Still learning something new every day.”
It cannot.
I never met my grandmother's twin brother, but I have always assumed that they were fraternal twins.
A lot of Jamaicans are mixed-race. Also, some are Chinese.
“Wow, I didn’t know that an unfertized human egg could split into two before it was fertilized. Still learning something new every day.”
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It cannot.
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Glad you’re confident of that. You must know far more about this than I do. By what mechanism did the two absolutely identical maternal haploids come about?
As I recall, he lost one. And that one was a mattress company that had been with him from the beginning. The rest eventually came back.
Rush was so disappointed in the owner of the company that when the owner asked to restart his advertising, Rush politely refused his business.
That’s what my doc told me when my twins were born...same sac = identical...and they have spent every day since birth trying to look different...lol
Aren’t the scientists jumping the gun a little?
I mean, have the two kids even decided what gender they want to be?
And a single ovum being fertilised by more than one sperm (polyspermy) is a vanishingly rare event, because normally, there are several biological blocks to polyspermy (the fast and slow blocks. Fast block is an almost immediate change in the polarity of the egg’s cell membrane, and the slow block is the raising of the hyalin layer several seconds later)...
(M.Sc. in Reproductive Physiology, in case you wondered).
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