You may not be alone…via CBS News:
Three-year-old Isbac Pacunda absorbed his twin brother as they developed in their mother’s womb. The result? A parasitic twin in the stomach of the living boy.
The partially formed fetus weighs a pound and a half and is 9 inches long, according to Dr. Carlos Astocondor of Las Mercedes Hospital in Chiclayo, Peru. Doctors in Peru found the parasitic twin and planned to surgically remove the tissue Monday. It has some hair on the cranium, eyes and some bones.
Cândido Godói, a Brazilian village with an extreme abundance of blonde twins, has long spawned conspiracy theories. Namely, that infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele (who visited repeatedly in the 1960s and treated locals) created an “Aryan twin town.” However, the New York Times reports that scientists have identified a “twins gene” possessed by residents (who are mostly of German descent and have a high rate of inbreeding), likely putting the matter to rest:
For years, so many twins have been born in the small southern Brazilian town of Cândido Godói that residents wonder whether something mysterious lurks in the water, or even if Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the Angel of Death, conducted experiments on the women there.
But a group of scientists now says it can rule out such long-rumored possibilities. Ursula Matte, a geneticist in Porto Alegre, Brazil, said a series of DNA tests conducted on about 30 families since 2009 found that a specific gene in the population of Cândido Godói appears more frequently in mothers of twins than in those without.
