By Stephanie Pappas, Live
Science Contributor | September 25, 2017 04:21pm ET
The cat, according
to Newsflare, died at 2 days old. A short life span is common
for these two-faced cats, which have a condition called diprosopus. The name
"Janus" refers to the similarly two-faced Roman god.
Occasionally, diprosopus is
caused by a case of conjoined twinning in which just one head forms, said Niels
Pedersen, a professor emeritus at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.
More often, Pedersen told Live Science, the problem is a hiccup in a gene that
makes a protein named "sonic hedgehog." The protein is important in
the embryonic development of the skull and face, as well as the extremities.
It's named after the video game hedgehog for quirky reasons: Previously
discovered, related proteins, had been named after different species of
hedgehogs because of their spiky shapes. The discovery of the sonic hedgehog
gene happened just around the time the Sega game hit the U.S. (The researcher
who named it had kids who were aficionados.) [The 12
Weirdest Animal Discoveries]
Mutations in the sonic hedgehog
gene are partially responsible for the loss of
limbs in snakes, for example, and changes in the gene have been
implicated in the evolutionary
divergence between species.
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