Originally published at: Step right up and see the astonishing cyclops goat with two eyes in one socket | Boing Boing
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That goat is too myopic for me.
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There is a similar developmental anomaly in humans called holoprosencephaly. Lifespans are usually short.
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Holoprosencephaly occurs when the brain fails to divide properly into the right and left hemispheres .
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It does indeed. And is sometimes accompanied by the face not dividing into right and left sides.
Blurred because, well, it’s not a nice picture.
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guys do we have to do this? i can’t even look at an egg with a double yolk.
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No, not a nice picture.
In my last year of high school, 5 students of my “Liceo” were selected to visit the “Muso Anatomico Eugenio Morelli”.
Only a few students were given the opportunity, as the museum was not (and is not) open to the general public and definitely not for the easily disgusted or shocked.
Created in 1941, it contains an array of notable items, mostly preserved in formalin, among which many malformed foetuses.
I still remember one very similar to the picture above, and one with two heads.
As a teenager I was quite surprised, I really did not think such things were a factual possibility.
Apart from the shock factor, I still remember the visit as extremely interesting (we were guided by an anatomical pathologist), especially two items:
a complete nervous system, from the peripheral nerves in fingers and toes, to the spinal cord, to the brain hemispheres, and an ‘anatomical atlas’: a series of 50 or so slices of a human body, each pressed between two glass panes, and mounted vertically on rails, so that one could page through them with minimal effort.
The first only contained the tip of the nose, the last, two thin slices of the buttocks - between those, all the internals of the body (a young man) appeared as a real life TC scan.
To this day, I have no idea how they managed to create it.
I’m not squeamish or afraid of blood or medical procedures (e.g. in more recent times I greatly enjoyed exhibitions like Body Worlds* ) but that visit cemented my resolve to not become a doctor.
* I take BW as a canonical example of the different attitude towards some subject in USA vs. Europe: in Las Vegas, we had to lie to have my daughter with us, as the exhibition was forbidden for people less than 16 (IIRC), in Stockholm, it was on a floor in the middle of a science-oriented museum for kids.
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California corn lily contains cyclopamine and causes cyclopia in livestock (or humans, I suppose) if it’s eaten. I wonder if there is a similar South Asian plant.
(Not so) fun facts: the protein that’s encoded for the gene that causes holoprosencephaly is called Sonic Hedgehog because, well, he’s got 2-in-1 eyes:
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