It’s Friday, So Please Enjoy This Story About The First-Ever Identical Twin Puppies On Record
Know this: they are puppies, there are two of them and they are identical.
It’s the end of the week. You’re tired. Now is the perfect time to read a story about two tiny puppies who happen to be the first identical puppy twins ever recorded. You’re welcome.
This is them.
Researchers at South Africa’s University of Pretoria discovered the identical Irish wolfhounds when the owner of the puppies brought their mum to veterinarian Kurt de Cramer, who delivered the puppies, took these wonderful glamour shots and established their identical status through a DNA test. They can’t be 100 percent sure that these are the first identical twin puppies ever in existence, but they’re certainly the first to be confirmed.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of monozygotic twinning in the dog confirmed using DNA profiling,” De Cramer and his colleagues wrote in their research paper. Co-author Carolynne Joone, a veterinary researcher at Queensland’s James Cook University, told the BBC: “There have been rumours about twins in dogs before, we just happened to be lucky enough to be able to confirm it genetically.”
Here are the good puppies with their mum. (Photo credit: Kurt de Cramer.)
The puppy twins are named Cullen (Twilight fan?) and Romulus. Know this: they are puppies, there are two of them and they are identical. Happy Friday!
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Images via BBC/Kurt de Cramer.