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Two Headed Fossil


Jack_of_Blades

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"Two-headed reptile fossil found

French and Chinese palaeontologists have identified the fossil of a two-headed reptile from a species that lived in what is now China nearly 150 million years ago.

The specimen was recovered from the Yixian Formation, a treasure trove of fossils in north-eastern China that has previously yielded the remains of early birds and feathered dinosaurs.

Only seven centimetres long, the tiny skeleton from the early cretaceous period shows an embryonic or newborn reptile with two heads and two necks.

It was a species of long-necked aquatic lizard that was more than a metre when fully grown.

Axial bifurcation - two-headedness - is a well-known developmental flaw among reptile species today such as turtles and snakes.

The paper appears on Wednesday in Biology Letters, published by the Royal Society, which is Britain's defacto academy of sciences."

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Given the rarity of both the mutation itself and of the animal actually forming into a fossil, this is an amazing find. Only makes sense that the same flaw would have occurred in prehistory as well.

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