Two-Headed Piglet Unearthed From Garden
Meadville, PA – Sharon Reagle spent Sunday afternoon toiling in her mother’s garden, planting hostas, until she discovered something quite bizarre.
The woman unearthed a curious looking sealed glass jar brimming with an unidentified fluid with a tied bag submerged inside. Upon further inspection of the contents, Reagle realized the fluid was a preservative, fully-conserving the remains of a foot long, brown-and-white polycephalic piglet, complete with two snouts, according to WSBTV.
No one is exactly sure how long the mutated, two-headed oddity had been buried in the yard on Grange Center Road – only that Reagle’s parents had owned the property for 56 years and never owned pigs.
The jar itself will likely be easier and less costly to test in order to estimate how long the preserved pig resided in the yard.
Following the impromptu excavation and examination, Reagle stowed the creature inside a freezer overnight and contacted the Allegheny College regarding donating the biological specimen.
Monday afternoon, Lisa Whitenack, an assistant professor of biology at the college, eagerly accepted the piglet. She was quoted by the Meadville Tribune saying, “This is like Christmas for a biologist. The students will love it.”
Based on Whitenack’s opinion, the animal was not preserved in a lab, as it did not appear to be incised in such a way as to allow formaldehyde or other preservatives to saturate the inner-cadaver. Therefore, as much as the outside may appear intact, the insides may show some signs of decay or putrefaction.
After documenting the specimen, Whitenack intends to eventually de-flesh the piglet and display what will likely be considered a fascinating skeleton.
Polycephaly, along with bicephaly and dicephaly, is rare genetic anomaly that results in two-heads, even three-heads, or two-faces on a single head.
Typically, these mutations in nature fail to survive or make it to adulthood. In the few instances they have lived, it’s generally when two complete heads independent of one another have formed. Still, mobility and mortality can be limited, and one of the heads may be underdeveloped.
In the case of the deformed piglet, it is likely due to an incomplete embryonic separation of monozygotic twins – similar to the principle of conjoined twins. One extreme example of this is the condition of craniopagus parasiticus, whereby a fully developed body has a parasitic twin head joined at the skull.
The most common occurrence of multi-heads is found in turtles and snakes, but sheep, dogs, cats, cattle, and pigs can suffer from this obscure abnormality.
[Image via Shutterstock]
