Two-Headed Dolphins and Sharks, Oh My!

Like some evil science experiment gone wrong (or right?), two horrifying, two-headed sea creatures have recently been discovered, showing just how bizarre nature can be.

Vacationer Tungrul Metin noticed the corpse of what he suspected was a dolphin wash up on a beach in Izmir, Turkey last Monday. After getting a closer look at the body, he quickly called the police, who came to remove the carcass before curious onlookers could crowd the beach.

"I couldn't take it in at first... I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me... I've never even heard about a dolphin like this let alone seen one with my own eyes," Metin told the Daily Mail. "I was completely shocked."

And he had right to be. What Metin discovered was the bloated corpse of a two-headed dolphin calf about three feet long and complete with two sets of eyes, two mouths, and even two blow holes, all branching from a single normal dolphin body.

The Daily Mail reports that Mehmet Gokoglu has been given the opportunity to study the unique dolphin. He says that there is nothing maleficent behind this phenomenon, and the specimen is simply an example of a very rare event, "similar to the occurrence of conjoined human twins."

Still, as rare as it is, this dolphin calf is not the only two headed sea creature to be seen recently. Back in 2011, a fisherman found a two-headed bull shark inside the uterus of one of his recent catches, which he quickly turned over to the scientific community for study.

A paper later published in 2013 in the Journal of Fish Biology details how scientists confirmed that the shark was in fact an example of dicephalia (two headedness) and NOT conjoined twins. In nature, conjoined twins often have near-complete or complete sets or organs, even if those organs can be found side-by-side in the same body. Dicephalia, however, means that one organism simply has two heads branching from one very normal body - a mutation that the newborn is unlikely to survive.

"The two-headed specimen probably would have died after birth," study co-author Michael Wagner told The Register. "It was near-to-term, but should have been a lot larger - the body looks to have invested so much energy in growing a separate head that the rest of the body was foreshortened."

Wagner added in a statement that there is no evidence that pollutants are the cause for these amazing occurrences.

"Given the timing of the shark's discovery with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I could see how some people may want to jump to conclusions," Wagner said. "Making that leap is unwarranted. We simply have no evidence to support that cause or any other."

Mother nature just sometimes does weird things.