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Aborted Sheep with human face ???

marting

Illuminator
marting
Joined
Sep 18, 2003
Messages
4,280
Pravda reports a sheep caesarian yields a human faced sheep then alludes to the obvious if odious:

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/12-01-2010/111621-sheep_human_face-0

Veterinaries said that the rare mutation most likely occurred as a result of improper mutation since the fodder for the lamb’s mother was abundant with vitamin A, CNNTurk.com reports.

A goat from Zimbabwe gave birth to a similar youngster in September 2009. The mutant baby born with a human-like head stayed alive for several hours until the frightened village residents killed him.

The governor of the province where the ugly goat was born said that the little goat was the fruit of unnatural relationship between the female goat and a man.
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Well, the face is remarkable. Would the study of the lamb's DNA be useful in finding out what area of mutation could cause this? One hopes they make it available for study.

Reminds me a bit of the old cig joke: "I'd walk a mile for a Camel, two for a sheep" back in the time of the ubiquitous Camel ads.
 
Pareloidia. It's not especially human-looking to me, no more than the cheese toasties with the image of the Virgin Mary on them.

I don't imagine it's a mutation either, it looks like a simple malformation. I do post-mortems on scores of aborted lambs every spring, and this isn't anything special except for the coincidental "face-like" appearance which as I say is pareloidia. And indeed, it's not that hard for a face to look like a face. At least the lamb starts off with two eyes a nose and a mouth anyway.

You'd need to do a proper abortion investigation on it, which I suspect hasn't been done. It'll be some ordinary reason for a cranial malformation. In our lab, someone ioght have remarked, hey, doesn't that lamb's face look kind of human! before tossing the remains in the bucket.

Rolfe.

ETA: I see one suggestion is hypervitaminosis A. I haven't come across that in the sheep, but the condition in general does give rise to abnormal and excessive bone formation.

ETA again: I just did some very quick googling. Just looking for "vitamin A" and sheep got me loads about vitamin A deficiencies and dietary requirements for the vitamin. This is as you'd expect. Googling "hypervitaminosis A" and sheep got me some stuff about effects on adult sheep only. Adding foetus to that didn't get me anything very definite. It doesn't look as if this is a common or even really a recognised cause of teratogenicity in the sheep in any country that writes up its results. I think the vitamin A idea is someone who hasn't got a clue taking a decent guess.
 
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Two eyes? Check.
Nose? Check.
Mouth? Check?

Well, there you go! Seriously, though, I think this is a better picture. It's pretty clear to me it's just seeing what you want to see.
 
It's the Lamb of God!

I can't help thinking it mostly resembles a pizza.
 
Here's a link with a second photo:
http://www.today.az/news/turkey/59237.html

The second one doesn't look so much like a human face. And it provides some context missing in the first photo: The lower jaw ends up being underdeveloped enough to look like a lip in the first photo. And the skin/fat/flesh/whatever sags enough to make the head in that first pic look like it had a chin; you see better in the second image what that really is.
 
Isn't this the same paper that publishes UFO stories with pictures of 'actual crashed spaceships'? I believe that this is a made-up story.
 
Have I spelled it wrong? It means imagining things like faces and trees in clouds and flames and stuff like that.

Rolfe.
 
My rule of thumb is -- misspellings are fine as long as Google can still autocorrect it.
 
"... it's pareloidia..."

Naaah. It's Photoshopped.

Or else... "It's the Lamb of God!"

Yeah. An angel of the Lord appeared and said unto the ewe, "... Hail , thou that art highly favored , the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God."

Just what we need. Another damn religion. Humph.
 
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Skeptic Guy said:
I believe in both cases, the animal was destroyed. I would think that someone would have kept it around for further study.
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Sorry, but why?

It's an aborted sheep foetus. Trust me, any veterinary investigation centre has these coming out of its ears at lambing time. We get a diagnosis in about 80% of submissions, the other 20% are mostly in the category of "just one of those things".

Cranial deformities are nothing particularly unusual. I had one with hydrocephalus last spring. Jaw abnormalities are also fairly usual. There are also quite a few where there is no real deformity but the skull has become misshapen during a difficult birth, either because the cranial sutures, which are of course not fused, are misaligned, or because the head has swelled up with fluid due to malpresentation. (This looks a bit like a combination of these factors to me, though as it was a caesarian I'm not sure that the head would have been hung, which is what it actually looks like.)

Studying this one particularly, just because somebody has sold its story to the papers on the basis that they think the malformed head looks a bit human, would be a complete waste of resources. It only hit the press because it happened among superstitious and uneducated people. If it had happened here, someone might have remarked, well, look at that then, before consigning it to the bucket with the other 25 we'd examined that day.

In any event, I'm still skeptical.
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Er, what are you sceptical of? It's an ovine foetus which is mis-shapen in such a way that someone thought the head looked a bit human. It's along the same lines as the cheese toastie with the figure of the Virgin Mary on it. What's to be sceptical of?

Rolfe.
 
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Rolfe said:
Er, what are you sceptical of? It's an ovine foetus which is mis-shapen in such a way that someone thought the head looked a bit human. It's along the same lines as the cheese toastie with the figure of the Virgin Mary on it. What's to be sceptical of?
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What he said. It's why I posted the link to the James Dickey poem.

Like the rare, impossible, never before seen two-headed calf!! and all the other stillborn/aborted deformed animals that used to show up in every dime museum and sideshow, these things happen. Their significance is what people want to make of it.

I don't think this one is so unusual that one needs to rely on an explanation of photoshop or, in the old days, a taxidermy chimera.
 
Rolfe said:
It's an aborted sheep foetus. Trust me, any veterinary investigation centre has these coming out of its ears at lambing time. We get a diagnosis in about 80% of submissions, the other 20% are mostly in the category of "just one of those things".
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Out of idle curiosity, why do they do these investigations?
 
Aoidoi said:
Out of idle curiosity, why do they do these investigations?
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To find out the cause of the abortion, so that the problem can be addressed.
Chlamydophila ovis
Toxoplasma gondii
Salmonella dublin
Management/mothering issues
Other stuff

Some farmers will bring the first abortion in, saying "it's probably just one of those things, but just in case it's the start of something...." Others wait till they simply can't ignore the pile of dead lambs any longer. But this is their crop. They need to know what's causing any excessive losses.

You can vaccinate against Chlamydophila (EAE) and Toxoplasma, so if you have one of these you know what to do for next year at least.

Rolfe.
 
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