INTERNATIONAL: A calf with two heads, an extremely rare condition, was recently born in India's northeastern Gomati district. The calf was born on Saturda , 15 January at a farmer's house.
The female calf has a medical condition called 'Polycephaly'.
Polycephaly is the condition of having more than one head.Two-headed animals (called bicephalic or dicephalic) and three-headed (tricephalic) animals are the only type of multi-headed creatures seen in the real world, and form by the same process as conjoined twins from monozygotic twin embryos.
Polycephaly occurs when an organism has multiple heads. Two heads can be side by side and supported by one torso, or two heads can be directly linked with a torso supporting only one. Two heads can share control of one's organs and limbs. When animals have the condition, at times, their brains fight with each other.
The Deputy Director of the Animal Resources Development Department in Tripura, Dr Pritam Sarkar has said on Tuesday that he has never seen such a case in Tripura in the last 10-15 year. It is a rarest of the rare case. In such cases, the survival rate is very low, it is around 38 per cent, and it becomes very difficult to save the calf. The calf has two heads, two ears, and four eyes.
The state were the animal is born has launched a scheme to give birth to female calves in order to boost milk production.
In a similar case, a calf with two heads was born in Lazec, a village in North Macedonia, in April 2021.
